[Foundation-l] PediaPress

[phoebe ayers]

On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 12:51 PM, SlimVirgin <slimvirgin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 13:59, Ting Chen <wing.philopp at gmx.de> wrote:
>> I know that also this example is not without flaw, as comparisons always
>> are. What I want to say is, if a company can provide us a service that
>> we really desperately need and we cannot get elsewhere, and it shares
>> the same value as we are, I think it is a correct decision to take that
>> service. I am sure this answer is maybe not satisfactory, but I hope it
>> can explain a little what my personal opinion is.
>
> I understand exactly what you're saying, Ting, and I appreciate your
> thoughtful response. I suppose my reaction is an emotional one, but
> I'd argue no less valid for that. It's that much of the content of
> Wikipedia is written and administered by a surprisingly small number
> of people. We do it for nothing because we believe in the concept of
> free (in all senses) information. But now to the left of my vision,
> with every edit I make, there is a "create book" button, where a
> private company is quite openly making money from our work. That feels
> discouraging.

Every edit you make is also mirrored by answers.com, which quite
openly makes money off of our work as well. This particular line of
reasoning has not historically served as a discouragement to most of
our editor base.

The crux of the question seems to me to rather be who and how we
directly partner with, and what services do we offer to readers (and
contributors) by such partners through the site itself. In the case of
PediaPress, it's fairly low-key; what you see in the sidebar is
actually a link to the "book creator" tool, which is extension code to
make a collection of pages that can then be generated as a pdf. It is
only after you click through and do this that you are offered a link
to "Get a printed book from our print-on-demand partner" and a link to
PediaPress appears. People are quite free to create a pdf collection
and never send it to PediaPress, which wouldn't generate a dime for
them, and my instinct is that this accounts for the majority of the
tool's use.

I don't mean to be dismissive, though; asking about partnerships is a
totally valid question, and we should at the very least keep any such
partnerships open so that we can always consider if there are other
and better services, extensions, etc. available to offer in addition
to or in place of existing ones.

-- phoebe