On 6/11/06, Kelly Martin <kelly.lynn.martin(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 6/11/06, Robert Scott Horning
<robert_horning(a)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.