Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
I just wanted to add that for me, a huge part of the motivation for what we are doing is people who are not going to be able to get online reliably for years or decades to come. Paper is still the cheapest way to distribute content in many parts of the world.
Is that really true? Computer equipment is becoming so incredibly cheap that printing out (and shipping) a paper encyclopedia looks pretty expensive in comparison. Maybe if there is a lack of electricity paper is still a good idea for now, but given how bulky paper is, and how expensive printing is (especially if we do frequent print runs), I can't see it being the case for too long that it's cheaper to distribute a gigantic 20-volume set of books than to distribute a single DVD-ROM (or possibly even a CD-ROM with compression of pre-rendered pages, and perhaps some downsampling of images), *even* if we have to distribute a way to read it too. If you take into account periodic updates---mailing out a single CD-ROM that can be read on the same device versus distributing an entirely new 20-volume set of books---the books start to look even more expensive.
I personally like paper, but digital stuff is just so much cheaper I can't see paper being the *cheap* option, unless for some reason donations of printing and shipping services turn out to be easier to come by than donations of low-end computers.
-Mark