[Foundation-l] BBC "5 Live Investigates" on Books LLC, Sunday night 9pm UTC

[David Gerard]

[To WMUK-l for local interest, and foundation-l as the issue's been
discussed there at length.]


Just spoke to a researcher, Charlotte something, for BBC 5 Live
Investigates, Sunday 9pm, this item likely to go out 9:45pm or so.
This was just for her research, it wasn't a recorded piece.

The piece is on Books LLC and similar operations, which sell reprints
of Wikipedia articles as books on Amazon. She was after the Wikipedian
viewpoint.

I said that it's entirely legal - that you can use our stuff without
permission, even commercially, and we like that - "Please, use our
stuff!" - you just have to give credit and let other people reuse your
version: "share and share alike."

So the only issue is that it isn't clear enough these books are just
Wikipedia reprints. For us, the annoyance - I said that "annoyance" is
probably the word - is when a Wikipedian finds one of these books,
goes "aha, a source!", buys it and ... discovers it's just reprints of
stuff they have. "While trademark is an issue, we'd like them or
Amazon to make it a *bit* clearer that these texts are Wikipedia
reprints."

She wasn't clear on the business model. I said these are
print-on-demand books, where *no* copies exist until someone orders
one, at which point a single copy is printed and sent. POD is *very
good* these days - you can send a PDF to a machine, and the machine
will produce an *absolutely beautiful* perfect-bound book for you,
which previously would have been quite pricey. This is enough for them
to have a tiny, tiny niche.

I also pointed out that anyone can make their own PDFs of Wikipedia
articles and some of the projects have partnerships with outside
companies to do nice printed books of Wikipedia reprints. But in such
cases, everyone is very clear on what they're getting: a nice printed
physical copy of content they already have for free on the web.

I tried to answer very descriptively, as I can't speak *for* 160,000
people, but there's been enough foundation-l and related discussion to
get an idea of what people think. My apologies if I missed bits, this
was off the top of my head without referring to nuances of discussion
:-)


- d.