On 6/11/06, Kelly Martin kelly.lynn.martin@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/11/06, Robert Scott Horning robert_horning@netzero.net wrote:
Has any thought gone into producing printed materials (either on CD or even dead tree format) for high quality materials derived from Wikimedia project pages?
I fear that printed material like this is of sufficiently low margin as to not be a very effective fundraising activity. The costs involved in producing high-quality printed material are substantial. Sadly, the quality of product produced by the vanity presses (like Lulu) is not very high, and I fear that it would do us a disservice. (I have the same concern regarding the merchandise we sell through Cafe Press.)
Kelly
I think CDs and/or DVDs would make a good "thank you" gift for donators. Wikimedia might even get someone to donate the cost of physically producing the CDs/DVDs. In that sense I think it'd increase the amount of donations. I always used to buy my FreeBSD install CDs directly from freebsd.org rather than from Cheapbytes (back before *BSD died :), and I think a lot of people do that kind of thing.
The real issue I think would be the legal can of worms it would open. Better for Wikimedia to license its copyrights and trademarks to a third party (on a $ per copy basis) and let them sell the CDs/DVDs/print versions?/etc.