[Foundation-l] Bertelsmann publishes "Wikipedia Encyclopedia in One Volume"

[Oldak Quill]

2008/4/23 teun spaans <teun.spaans at gmail.com>:
> According to the NYT interview, this book will center around popular issues
>  and B. sees it as a kind of yearbook.
>
>  Though I only occasionallly wrote on .de,  i cannot tell if the german
>  language version has the same abundance for telly, sport and movies related
>  subjects as some other large wikis. If so, wikipedia may be a good choice
>  for them. If this succeeds, they may turn to more specilized subjects,
>  encyclopedias for soccer, golf, other sports, mammals, geography and such
>  may well come up somewhere in the future.

I think even more specialised selections of articles may be a good
place to look. Generally, I would imagine, the more specialised a
subject, the less competition there is in terms of reference works for
that subject.

Specialised areas which might generate a fair amount of demand are
guides to fictional worlds. Obviously, there is a lot of interest
associated with these, and there may be a fair amount of competition
in terms of reference works. en.Wikipedia has a good number of
articles about fictional worlds associated with fantasy (Harry Potter,
Lord of the Rings, Foundation, Dune). Contributors tend to be very
interested in these areas and their coverage tends to be very good
(where coverage hasn't been deleted). If a guide to say... Lord of the
Rings, or (dare I mention) Pokemon, were compiled from Wikipedia
content and published and sold in book shops, a fair bit of funding
could be generated for the Wikimedia Foundation.

Other specialised areas we might look at are collectors areas (stamps,
coins), enthusiast areas (airplanes, ships, cars), gardening...

If there were the drive to compile articles into books and copyedit
them, would there be any effective way to print, bind and put them in
bookshops to be sold?

-- 
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)