Since 2008, we've offered a small feature to download printed books from Wikipedia article. This is done in partnership with a company called PediaPress.
They've sold about 15K books over that time period, not enough to break even, and the support/maintenance burden for the service is no longer worth it for them.
We'll disable this feature in coming weeks. We'd only continue to offer it if there's 1) strong community interest in maintaining it, and 2) a partner who steps up to provide the service.
We'll continue to provide PDF downloads (soon with a new rendering engine).
Thanks, Erik
Am 11.07.2014 00:25, schrieb Erik Moeller:
Since 2008, we've offered a small feature to download printed books from Wikipedia article. This is done in partnership with a company called PediaPress.
They've sold about 15K books over that time period, not enough to break even, and the support/maintenance burden for the service is no longer worth it for them.
We'll disable this feature in coming weeks.
It's a pity, as I liked that service/very much/, it was quick, reliable, perfect quality, not too expensive. The only feature what I missed was the inability to add further PDF pages.
We'd only continue to offer it if there's 1) strong community interest in maintaining it, and 2) a partner who steps up to provide the service.
We'll continue to provide PDF downloads (soon with a new rendering engine).
Thanks, Erik
Dear Erik,
so the Book Creator will still be active, maybe under another name, maybe with another engine, but still active?
Thanks for the answer in advance.
L.
2014-07-11 0:25 GMT+02:00 Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org:
Since 2008, we've offered a small feature to download printed books from Wikipedia article. This is done in partnership with a company called PediaPress.
They've sold about 15K books over that time period, not enough to break even, and the support/maintenance burden for the service is no longer worth it for them.
We'll disable this feature in coming weeks. We'd only continue to offer it if there's 1) strong community interest in maintaining it, and 2) a partner who steps up to provide the service.
We'll continue to provide PDF downloads (soon with a new rendering engine).
Thanks, Erik
-- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
Wikitech-ambassadors mailing list Wikitech-ambassadors@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-ambassadors
On Fri, Jul 11, 2014 at 8:45 AM, Luca Martinelli martinelliluca@gmail.com wrote:
so the Book Creator will still be active, maybe under another name, maybe with another engine, but still active?
Same name and functionality, just the "Order a printed book" feature will disappear.
Erik
Il 11/lug/2014 17:48 "Erik Moeller" erik@wikimedia.org ha scritto:
On Fri, Jul 11, 2014 at 8:45 AM, Luca Martinelli martinelliluca@gmail.com wrote:
so the Book Creator will still be active, maybe under another name, maybe with another engine, but still active?
Same name and functionality, just the "Order a printed book" feature will disappear.
Thanks for your answer. :)
I'm a bit sad about the deprecation of the PediaPress functionality - even if, I must be honest, I only used it once, for a gift to a friend. Nevertheless, even if it was several years ago and it had some minor flaws due to its initial stage, it was still a beautiful book and a well planned idea.
I still occasionally download some epub's on my Kindle made from Wikisource books, so I think it is a good idea to continue to develop this extension - in other words, keep up the good job. ;)
Cheers,
L.
Il 11/07/2014 17:45, Luca Martinelli ha scritto:
Dear Erik,
so the Book Creator will still be active, maybe under another name, maybe with another engine, but still active?
Thanks for the answer in advance.
I hope it's version working on the beta wiki, that can render the citation template that are broken on the curren version (Luca, check http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Dido_Sotiriou and click on "Download as WMF PDF" on the left bar.
This will not (as I read it) affect the creation of books, merely remove the option to get a hard copy of them printed. The core functions of the book creator will remain intact.
Mdann52
Sent from my iPod
On 11 Jul 2014, at 16:45, Luca Martinelli martinelliluca@gmail.com wrote:
Dear Erik,
so the Book Creator will still be active, maybe under another name, maybe with another engine, but still active?
Thanks for the answer in advance.
L.
2014-07-11 0:25 GMT+02:00 Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org:
Since 2008, we've offered a small feature to download printed books from Wikipedia article. This is done in partnership with a company called PediaPress.
They've sold about 15K books over that time period, not enough to break even, and the support/maintenance burden for the service is no longer worth it for them.
We'll disable this feature in coming weeks. We'd only continue to offer it if there's 1) strong community interest in maintaining it, and 2) a partner who steps up to provide the service.
We'll continue to provide PDF downloads (soon with a new rendering engine).
Thanks, Erik
-- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
Wikitech-ambassadors mailing list Wikitech-ambassadors@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-ambassadors
-- Luca "Sannita" Martinelli http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utente:Sannita
Wikitech-ambassadors mailing list Wikitech-ambassadors@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-ambassadors
wikitech-ambassadors@lists.wikimedia.org