[Foundation-l] PediaPress

Tue Nov 16 01:10:11 UTC 2010

I'm sure the amount of money the Foundation receives from its cut of 
actually published books is negligible - probably a few hundred dollars 
a year. I'm more interested in your insinuation that PediaPress bought 
their partnership status. Since you managed to avoid answering either of 
my questions, I'll assume you have no evidence for these aspersions.

Ryan Kaldari

On 11/15/10 4:55 PM, Robert S. Horning wrote:
> On 11/15/2010 12:10 PM, Ryan Kaldari wrote:
>    
>> On 11/13/10 3:26 PM, Robert S. Horning wrote:
>>
>>      
>>> The difference between PediaPress and this other effort is that
>>> PediaPress came from the top down with money in hand, and the group I
>>> had was mostly grass roots with little money to start with in terms of
>>> getting things going.
>>>
>>>
>>>        
>> Do you have any evidence that PediaPress offered the Foundation money up
>> front for consideration as a partner? If so, how much money did they
>> give? This is a very serious accusation that requires some evidence in
>> my opinion, especially as it is contradicted by what Erik says.
>>
>> Ryan Kaldari
>>
>>      
> Let's turn this question around to something more legitimate to ask:
> how much money or other consideration has the WMF received from this
> effort?  Obviously some developer time went into the PDF maker and some
> of the things that you see with the button, and that certainly
> represents some "other considerations" as well.  I am not suggesting
> that the money went into the pockets of anybody but the WMF general fund
> that is being used to pay for the servers and the rest of the program
> and is certainly well accounted for.  I haven't looked at the financial
> disclosure statements recently for the WMF to see if the PediaPress
> money is broken out from other general donations either.
>
> All I'm trying to say here is that once the deal with PediaPress came
> through, it sort of blew out of the water any other effort to try
> something different, especially stuff that was being done by a largely
> adhoc group of Wikimedia volunteers doing stuff out of their own pocket
> without substantial financial backing.  PediaPress obviously was more
> established and certainly had the finances in place to get something
> done.  That this volunteer effort isn't going any more (mind you, I was
> not the only person working on it either) should say something at least
> that it discouraged other efforts to provide printed materials.  That is
> the point I'm trying to make here.
>
> I also am not a huge fan of the automated preparing of texts, at least
> all of the automation that is happening.  I think books are a work of
> art unto themselves and the current content preparation sort of misses
> something in the process, making the books that are produced somewhat
> sterile and missing some of the flavor that comes with hand crafting the
> content.  There were certainly some tasks that could be automated, but I
> think it also goes a bit too far for my taste as well.  It gets raw
> content out there, but the process could be improved and right now that
> is being blocked because what is being done is "good enough" for most
> casual efforts to print books.  To take it to the next tier and get a
> really professionally published book would take much, much more effort
> and the development of tools that are in my opinion now being blocked
> because of the presence of PediaPress.
>
> This is not to say that the WMF can't look into alternative fund raising
> options, and it certainly is within the right of the WMF to consider
> legitimate offers that come along.  This offer from PediaPress certainly
> filled a niche and has proven to be fairly useful to at least a small
> number of Wikimedia users, and the question that ought to be raised now
> is if this level of participation and usage of printed materials is
> sufficient or is there a potential for other options to also be tried to
> perhaps step it up a notch or two.  There is some excellent content on
> the Wikimedia projects that is often laying around quite hidden and I
> think printing the content would be a useful thing to spread that
> knowledge to a wider audience.
>
> Unfortunately, stepping the effort up a notch is going to take some
> significant effort and possibly some financing... something that also
> could potentially increase liability for the WMF if they were more
> directly involved too.  Increased liability plus being at least for
> awhile a fiscal sink doesn't sound too appealing to the WMF, and I
> understand why things are being done the way they are being done right
> now.  Still, I see printed content with inferior quality content
> compared to what I see on Wikimedia projects selling in much larger
> volumes in major publishing markets... so why is that gap there?
>
> -- Robert Horning
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