Re: [Foundation-l] Printed on Demand Books from Wikipedia articles

Hi everybody, as the title suggests I would like to introduce a website to the wikimedia community that offers books consisting of wikipedia articles that areprinted on demand. The unique feature is that every user can individually pick arbitrary articles from the wikipedia (currently only from the english version) and add them to his book. Once the user is satisfied with the book's content, he can download a pdf-preview and check how the book will look like when printed. The last step is to order the book and get a unique encyclopedia containing only selected wikipedia articles. The service is located at http://www.pediapress.com and has not yet been publicly announced. I would like to know the opinion of the wikimedia community about this service, since I am aware of the fact that a couple of copyright and also "moral" issues are related to selling wikipedia content. Some of these issues are pointed out in the thread "Offering Wikibooks content for sale" (http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/63024). I would like to give you some details about our efforts to comply with the GFDL and also the spirit of the wikipedia content and community: * on the pediapress.com website and in the printed books it is clearly stated that all articles have their origin in the wikipedia project * below each article a link (in case of the book the plain URL) to the original wikipedia article is shown * all principle authors are listed below an article in the book if possible * pediapress does not generate any unnecessary traffic on wikipedia since we use the wikipedia dumps * we e-mailed with Angela Beesley (member of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation) and Brad Patrick (general counsel to the Wikimedia Foundation) who did not see anything problematic with our service Last but not least I want to point out that the pediapress affiliate program has the goal to generate donations to the wikimedia foundation: after ordering a book, users have the option to publish and promote their book. Thereby others are able to buy the published book. The publisher receives a provision of 10% of the books price which he can donate to the wikimedia foundation.Please note that pediapress is still in a "beta" phase even though compiling, printing and ordering books is perfectly possible. But since all processing and layouting is done automatically there are still some shortcomings that will be fixed asap. I don't want to deny that my company (brainbot technologies AG - http://brainbot.com) and I hope that pediapress supports itself financially. The main motivation nevertheless was to give something back to the wikipedia community. Since me and my colleagues aren't exactly good writers but heavy consumers of the wikipedia, we thought it would be a better idea to try to promote the offline usage of the wikipedia by building pediapress. Thanks for your patience - I hope some of you check out pediapress and post their opinions. Volker Haas _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l