Revenue and ISBN Links

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limholt＠excite.com

9 Jul 2003 9 Jul '03

5:36 p.m.

I've got a suggestion to make. Now that Wikimedia is in place and has a bank account, I think the issue is ripe for discussion. The Wikipedia special page 'Booksources' serves as a passthrough link to various bookstores. When a book reference in Wikipedia includes an ISBN, any reader clicking on that number gets to the Booksources page. A further click on "Find this book" links to the external vendor's web site, pasing on the ISBN when practical. Many of book sellers have programs that permit an affiliate or referring site the potential to earn revenue. In general, we could sign up then include our organization ID in a link along with the ISBN. Amazon dot com is an example of this usage. Based on the experience of other sites, there shouldn't be any great income expected, but there's not much effort either. The use of this option is totally transparent to the reader or user (unless they can interpret the data passed in the URI). I wanted to discuss possibility for two reasons: to see if there are objections, and to look at presentation alternatives. OBJECTION ARGUMENT: I do not view this as a commercialization of Wikipedia. I have a guest card at a local university library. They charge a small annual fee for this service, but that doesn't make their library a business. Nor can I see this as any danger to non-profit status, unless the revenue would exceed Wiki's expenses, which seems incredibly remote. So, why shouldn't we take advantage of this? PRESENTATION: We do need to consider how of if we inform the reader of this 'feature'. There are three broad choices available: 1. Just do it. 2. Implement the idea but inform the user. 3. Don't do it. My own choice is 2, but I'd actually propose 2(A), along the following lines. Explain to the reader (or user or editor) that Wiki may get a commission at no added cost to them if they buy the book. Also explain that they if they want us to get revenue, they need to buy it in one session, or come back through Wikipedia if they decide on a later purchase. We could even offer two options for passthrough, one with and one without a refer back to Wikipedia. Any comments? Regards, LouI on Wikipedia _______________________________________________ Join Excite! - http://www.excite.com The most personalized portal on the Web!

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Fred Bauder

9 Jul 9 Jul

6:11 p.m.

One problem is that the best site, AddAll, (where you can compare prices at all the other major sites) doesn't have a program. I'm not too happy with the proliferation of booksources anyway, for example, Powells is included. Nice if you have a few bucks extra for each book, but we don't tell our users that. Fred

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From: "limholt(a)excite.com" <limholt(a)excite.com> Reply-To: wikipedia-l(a)wikipedia.org Date: Wed, 9 Jul 2003 10:36:27 -0400 (EDT) To: wikipedia-l(a)wikipedia.org Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Revenue and ISBN Links I've got a suggestion to make. Now that Wikimedia is in place and has a bank account, I think the issue is ripe for discussion. The Wikipedia special page 'Booksources' serves as a passthrough link to various bookstores. When a book reference in Wikipedia includes an ISBN, any reader clicking on that number gets to the Booksources page. A further click on "Find this book" links to the external vendor's web site, pasing on the ISBN when practical. Many of book sellers have programs that permit an affiliate or referring site the potential to earn revenue. In general, we could sign up then include our organization ID in a link along with the ISBN. Amazon dot com is an example of this usage. Based on the experience of other sites, there shouldn't be any great income expected, but there's not much effort either. The use of this option is totally transparent to the reader or user (unless they can interpret the data passed in the URI). I wanted to discuss possibility for two reasons: to see if there are objections, and to look at presentation alternatives. OBJECTION ARGUMENT: I do not view this as a commercialization of Wikipedia. I have a guest card at a local university library. They charge a small annual fee for this service, but that doesn't make their library a business. Nor can I see this as any danger to non-profit status, unless the revenue would exceed Wiki's expenses, which seems incredibly remote. So, why shouldn't we take advantage of this? PRESENTATION: We do need to consider how of if we inform the reader of this 'feature'. There are three broad choices available: 1. Just do it. 2. Implement the idea but inform the user. 3. Don't do it. My own choice is 2, but I'd actually propose 2(A), along the following lines. Explain to the reader (or user or editor) that Wiki may get a commission at no added cost to them if they buy the book. Also explain that they if they want us to get revenue, they need to buy it in one session, or come back through Wikipedia if they decide on a later purchase. We could even offer two options for passthrough, one with and one without a refer back to Wikipedia. Any comments? Regards, LouI on Wikipedia _______________________________________________ Join Excite! - http://www.excite.com The most personalized portal on the Web! _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l(a)wikipedia.org http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l

steve vertigo

7:53 p.m.

...

Many of book sellers have programs that permit an affiliate or referring site the potential to earn revenue. In general, we could sign up then include our organization ID in a link along with the ISBN. Amazon dot com is an example of this usage. Based on the experience of other sites, there shouldn't be any great income expected, but there's not much effort either. The use of this option is totally transparent to the reader or user (unless they can interpret the data passed in the URI).

Its interesting. And certainly meritous of a debate... a long, heated, debate. I like the idea, but before a commercial or semi-commercial precedent is set, there ought be some philosophical groundrules set also. I doubt if this violates the GNU Fdl -- the material itself is not the currency exchanged. These debates, as we have many cats to herd... tend to take a while.... as they often should. -S*- __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month! http://sbc.yahoo.com

Tomasz Wegrzanowski

8:17 p.m.

On Wed, Jul 09, 2003 at 09:53:57AM -0700, steve vertigo wrote:

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It doesn't break GFDL, but it creates unhealthy pressure and Amazon people in particular are clearly evildoers, so Wikipedia shouldn't have anything to do with them.

steve vertigo

8:28 p.m.

--- Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw(a)users.sourceforge.net> wrote:

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It doesn't break GFDL, but it creates unhealthy pressure and Amazon people in particular are clearly evildoers, so Wikipedia shouldn't have anything to do with them.

"Amazon=Evildoers... We =/= Amazon." Hmm... BushLOgiC has permeated the Wikipedia eh? :) -SV __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month! http://sbc.yahoo.com

Tomasz Wegrzanowski

8:46 p.m.

On Wed, Jul 09, 2003 at 10:28:34AM -0700, steve vertigo wrote:

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--- Tomasz Wegrzanowski <taw(a)users.sourceforge.net> wrote:

It doesn't break GFDL, but it creates unhealthy pressure and Amazon people in particular are clearly evildoers, so Wikipedia shouldn't have anything to do with them.

"Amazon=Evildoers... We =/= Amazon." Hmm... BushLOgiC has permeated the Wikipedia eh?

I don't understand you. Supporting evildoers by sending clients to them is not a good thing to do.

Jimmy Wales

8:56 p.m.

Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:

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I don't understand you. Supporting evildoers by sending clients to them is not a good thing to do.

http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Booksources&isbn=03… We already list Amazon and several others, and we've consciously made the choice not to boycott anyone or have any particular editorial policy on this. I think that's the right thing to do, because it's really outside our mission to make controversial political statements about booksellers. We let the end user decide, and wash our hands of the matter. So this does raise the natural question: if we're sending people to Amazon anyway, is there any reason we should not accept a commission for doing it? If you think they are not evildoers, then there seems to be no problem. If you think that they *are* evildoers, then at least this will help to reduce their profits. <personal opinion> My own personal opinion: I'm not happy with some of the things that Amazon has done, but I'm also a very satisfied customer, and I shop there regularly. I think that the charge of 'evildoer' is overblown. I was just reading this history of Rwanda, with 800,000 dead due to genocide. That's evil. Amazon filing stupid patents, well, it's stupid and I don't like it, but we do need to keep some perspective. </personal opinion> Anyhow, I think it's an open question now that we've got a foundation, whether we should take advantage of revenue opportunities like this. See, here's the thing: a nonprofit organization has a moral obligation, I think, to be a good steward of the funds donated to it. People aren't donating money to us to engage in a hopeless boycott against Amazon. In the past, when I was the only financial patron, our only financial responsibility was to make me happy. And I was totally happy. Still am. :-) So, if it was just me paying all the bills, I'd say, sure, let's skip the Amazon money if it upsets a few people, because I'm all about harmony, and I'll just buy the new server and pay for all the bandwidth myself, and not worry much about it. But if people are going to be signing up to give us $20 or $2, then we should really think about maximizing our use of those funds *for our mission*. That's a responsibility that we have to people who donate money. --Jimbo

Tomasz Wegrzanowski

9:09 p.m.

On Wed, Jul 09, 2003 at 10:56:57AM -0700, Jimmy Wales wrote:

...

<personal opinion> My own personal opinion: I'm not happy with some of the things that Amazon has done, but I'm also a very satisfied customer, and I shop there regularly. I think that the charge of 'evildoer' is overblown. I was just reading this history of Rwanda, with 800,000 dead due to genocide. That's evil. Amazon filing stupid patents, well, it's stupid and I don't like it, but we do need to keep some perspective. </personal opinion>

Because of "stupid patents" milions died of AIDS. Part of money sent to Amazon goes to bribe politicians to expand patent laws, and in effect to kill more people.

erik_moeller＠gmx.de

9:28 p.m.

Jimmy-

...

If you think they are not evildoers, then there seems to be no problem. If you think that they *are* evildoers, then at least this will help to reduce their profits.

It would make us an official Amazon.com business partner, and I'm not sure I'm very comfortable with that idea. Also, would it be compatible with Wikimedia's non profit status? Regards, Erik

Jimmy Wales

9:40 p.m.

Erik Moeller wrote:

...

It would make us an official Amazon.com business partner, and I'm not sure I'm very comfortable with that idea. Also, would it be compatible with Wikimedia's non profit status?

Yes, it would be fine. It wouldn't affect our 501(c)(3) status (which is different from 'non profit' status, actually), so people could still take a tax deduction for donating money to us. However, the income would be 'unrelated business income', and we'd have to pay taxes on the income over $1000, to be reported on Form 990-T. --Jimbo

Oliver Pereira

10 Jul 10 Jul

12:14 a.m.

On Wed, 9 Jul 2003, Jimmy Wales wrote:

...

We already list Amazon and several others, and we've consciously made the choice not to boycott anyone or have any particular editorial policy on this. I think that's the right thing to do, because it's really outside our mission to make controversial political statements about booksellers. We let the end user decide, and wash our hands of the matter. So this does raise the natural question: if we're sending people to Amazon anyway, is there any reason we should not accept a commission for doing it?

Listing several booksellers and not picking any out for special treatment is all very neutral. But if we list several booksellers and then add, "By the way, if you go to *this* one, Wikipedia gets some money," then that is a clear encouragement to the users (or at least the ones who support us!) to go to *that* bookseller rather than the others. So it starts to look as if we are supporting that bookseller. Of course, we could just not mention the fact that Wikipedia gets money from one of them, but that could be considered dishonest.

...

If you think they are not evildoers, then there seems to be no problem. If you think that they *are* evildoers, then at least this will help to reduce their profits.

I think it is very likely that more people will buy from Amazon if they think they will be helping Wikipedia by doing so. And so Amazon will quite likely make more profits. Oliver +-------------------------------------------+ | Oliver Pereira | | Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science | | University of Southampton | | omp199(a)ecs.soton.ac.uk | +-------------------------------------------+

Jimmy Wales

12:23 a.m.

Oliver Pereira wrote:

...

I think it is very likely that more people will buy from Amazon if they think they will be helping Wikipedia by doing so. And so Amazon will quite likely make more profits.

Well, I think all the booksellers offer some kind of commissions program. Nearly all do, anyway, I guess we'd have to check each one of them to be sure about the exact details. --Jimbo

Toby Bartels

7:21 p.m.

Oliver Pereira wrote at first:

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Listing several booksellers and not picking any out for special treatment is all very neutral.

I'm not sure why we list individual booksellers in the first place. Suppose that we followed that plan and added some features for our users. For example, we could spend some effort ensuring that we found all of the online booksellers that we could possibly find. And then we listed the prices that the booksellers charge, to help our users make wise economic decisions. Wouldn't that be useful? But that's exactly what AddALL and PriceSCAN do -- these are the links that we made on the /original/ booksource page. Why link directly to Barnes & Noble or Amazon when AddALL and PriceSCAN cover those -- and much more! Even though we've added even more bookstores since, we still don't have all of those on AddALL or PriceSCAN -- so we're still favouring certain ones. Of course, adding the Japanese bookstores and the libraries is another matter; they're not covered on AddALL or PriceSCAN. BTW, I'm basing this on the list that appears on [[en:]]; presumably other languages have different lists, for which this may or may not be applicable. -- Toby

Jimmy Wales

7:55 p.m.

Toby Bartels wrote:

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I'm not sure why we list individual booksellers in the first place.

Some users, like me, have a preferred bookseller and would rather just click straight through. I'd rather pay a little more sometimes than go through the hassle of entering my credit card number and address again, so meta-searches aren't that interesting to me. Different people have different preferences, and we can easily accomodate them all, so, you know, why not? The only reason why not, that I've seen so far, is that some people not only want to boycott Amazon, they want to force others to do it as well. I'm not persuaded that *that* is what we want to be doing. --Jimbo

Toby Bartels

12 Jul 12 Jul

1:24 a.m.

Jimmy Wales wrote:

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Toby Bartels wrote:

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>I'm not sure why we list individual booksellers in the first place.

...

Different people have different preferences, and we can easily accomodate them all, so, you know, why not?

...

The only reason why not, that I've seen so far, is that some people not only want to boycott Amazon, they want to force others to do it as well. I'm not persuaded that *that* is what we want to be doing.

First of all, that's not /my/ motivation for questioning the link. While I personally will not do business with Amazon, I oppose Wikipedia's steering people away from them. My motivation is to avoid swamping the list of links with individual booksellers when the meta-searches are more useful. Remember that those (like you) with preferred booksellers can continue to use these with the meta-search sites. OTOH, newcomers can be harmed by not knowing that the meta-search sites aren't just another bookseller. As for those that /are/ motivated by opposition to Amazon, I don't know what they would really hope to get out of removing individual booksellers from the list. After all, Amazon is listed on both AddALL and PriceSCAN. Also, Fred and I are the only people in this discussion to question the list of individual booksellers (and neither of us has come out in /opposition/ yet!); I don't know what Fred's motivation is, but even if it's to force a boycott on others, that makes only 50% of us. ^_^ Anyway, I have a new idea: Just explain on the page what the difference is -- then people can make the decisions that they want. So see my new version of [[en:Special:Booksources]]. -- Toby

Karl Eichwalder

10 Jul 10 Jul

6:52 a.m.

Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)bomis.com> writes:

...

We already list Amazon and several others,

Unfortunately, that's not the "we" I seem to belong to.

...

and we've consciously made the choice not to boycott anyone or have any particular editorial policy on this.

There are many, many more bookstores, give them a chance!

...

I think that's the right thing to do, because it's really outside our mission to make controversial political statements about booksellers.

Refusing to take a posisition is a political statement, too. The classical encyclopaedians took a position: they promoted enlightment. But "we" seem to tell the user, it does not matter where to buy books.

...

If you think they are not evildoers, then there seems to be no problem. If you think that they *are* evildoers, then at least this will help to reduce their profits.

No, it will not: you just spend some marketing money to increase your profit. -- | ,__o http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/ | _-\_<, ke(a)suse.de (work) / keichwa(a)gmx.net (home) | (*)/'(*)

Jimmy Wales

4:27 p.m.

Karl Eichwalder wrote:

...

We already list Amazon and several others,

Unfortunately, that's not the "we" I seem to belong to.

I'm not sure what you mean. All I was talking about was what's on pages like this one: http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Booksources&isbn=03… The status quo is that we list 10 different booksellers in English, 2 in Japanese, and 3 libraries.

...

and we've consciously made the choice not to boycott anyone or have any particular editorial policy on this.

There are many, many more bookstores, give them a chance!

Well, sure! Any bookseller that accepts a search based on ISBN could easily be added. Just 'Edit this list of links' on the URL above.

...

I think that's the right thing to do, because it's really outside our mission to make controversial political statements about booksellers.

Refusing to take a posisition is a political statement, too.

I suppose so, in the sense that it is taking the position that wikipedia ought to be neutral on such matters. --Jimbo

Karl Eichwalder

11 Jul 11 Jul

4:21 a.m.

Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)bomis.com> writes:

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Unfortunately, that's not the "we" I seem to belong to.

I'm not sure what you mean.

It is simple: you (= "we") don't mind to link ISBNs with the Am*zon store; I do not like this.

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The status quo is that we list 10 different booksellers in English, 2 in Japanese, and 3 libraries.

This is better than it used to be.

...

Well, sure! Any bookseller that accepts a search based on ISBN could easily be added. Just 'Edit this list of links' on the URL above.

Many a lot German booksellers accept ordering books via the internet; unfortunately, the order interface isn't unified -- some even accept simple e-mail messages. -- | ,__o http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/ | _-\_<, ke(a)suse.de (work) / keichwa(a)gmx.net (home) | (*)/'(*)

Brion Vibber

9 Jul 9 Jul

10:47 p.m.

limholt(a)excite.com wrote:

...

2. Implement the idea but inform the user. My own choice is 2, but I'd actually propose 2(A), along the following lines. Explain to the reader (or user or editor) that Wiki may get a commission at no added cost to them if they buy the book. Also explain that they if they want us to get revenue, they need to buy it in one session, or come back through Wikipedia if they decide on a later purchase. We could even offer two options for passthrough, one with and one without a refer back to Wikipedia.

I would support this: keep options available and don't trick your users. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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participants (10)

Brion Vibber
erik_moeller＠gmx.de
Fred Bauder
Jimmy Wales
Karl Eichwalder
limholt＠excite.com
Oliver Pereira
steve vertigo
Toby Bartels
Tomasz Wegrzanowski