[Foundation-l] Fwd: BBC "5 Live Investigates"

Tue Feb 1 23:31:45 UTC 2011

Books, LLC. respond. They say they included Wikipedia URLs on their
pages, but Amazon removed them.

- d.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Andrew <andrew at booksllc.net>
Date: 1 February 2011 23:29
Subject: BBC "5 Live Investigates"
To: dgerard at gmail.com, slimvirgin at gmail.com, geniice at gmail.com,
thewub.wiki at gmail.com

Hi David Gerard,

I totally understand your concern about Wikipedia getting proper
credit on wiki books! And I understand how annoying it is when that
doesn’t happen.

What Charlotte was investigating, as I understand it, was why Amazon
in the UK had dropped the wiki book descriptions we (Books LLC)
provide them with.

Those descriptions credit Wikipedia as the source, include an excerpt
of one of the Wikipedia articles, a URL to read the full article at
Wikipedia, and the titles of other Wikipedia articles in the book
(space permitting). The book itself credits Wikipedia on the
publisher’s page, the introduction and at the end of every article. I
agree with you that readers have a right to that information.
Hopefully, with our continued pleading Amazon UK will provide it.

While Amazon didn’t explained why they dropped the Wikipedia credits,
they did say that they don’t allow URLs in book descriptions. I guess
they don’t want their customers leaving Amazon and going to Wikipedia.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please do let me know. I
will be happy to help in anyway I can.

Kind Regards,

Andrew Williams

Public Relations Manager

Books LLC

BBC "5 Live Investigates" on Books LLC, Sunday night 9pm UTC Remove Highlighting

________________________________________

[.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.

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