[Wikipedia-l] Revenue and ISBN Links

[Fred Bauder]

One problem is that the best site, AddAll, (where you can compare prices at
all the other major sites) doesn't have a program. I'm not too happy with
the proliferation of booksources anyway, for example, Powells is included.
Nice if you have a few bucks extra for each book, but we don't tell our
users that.

Fred

> From: "limholt at excite.com" <limholt at excite.com>
> Reply-To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> Date: Wed,  9 Jul 2003 10:36:27 -0400 (EDT)
> To: wikipedia-l at wikipedia.org
> Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Revenue and ISBN Links
> 
> 
> I've got a suggestion to make. Now that Wikimedia is in place and has a bank
> account, I think the issue is ripe for discussion.
> 
> The Wikipedia special page 'Booksources' serves as a passthrough link to
> various bookstores. When a book reference in Wikipedia includes an ISBN, any
> reader clicking on that number gets to the Booksources page. A further click
> on "Find this book" links to the external vendor's web site, pasing on the
> ISBN when practical.
> 
> Many of book sellers have programs that permit an affiliate or referring site
> the potential to earn revenue. In general, we could sign up then include our
> organization ID in a link along with the ISBN. Amazon dot com is an example of
> this usage. Based on the experience of other sites, there shouldn't be any
> great income expected, but there's not much effort either. The use of this
> option is totally transparent to the reader or user (unless they can interpret
> the data passed in the URI).
> 
> I wanted to discuss possibility for two reasons: to see if there are
> objections, and to look at presentation alternatives.
> 
> OBJECTION ARGUMENT:
> 
> I do not view this as a commercialization of Wikipedia. I have a guest card at
> a local university library. They charge a small annual fee for this service,
> but that doesn't make their library a business. Nor can I see this as any
> danger to non-profit status, unless the revenue would exceed Wiki's expenses,
> which seems incredibly remote. So, why shouldn't we take advantage of this?
> 
> PRESENTATION:
> 
> We do need to consider how of if we inform the reader of this 'feature'. There
> are three broad choices available:
> 
> 1.  Just do it.
> 2.  Implement the idea but inform the user.
> 3.  Don't do it.
> 
> My own choice is 2, but I'd actually propose 2(A), along the following lines.
> Explain to the reader (or user or editor) that Wiki may get a commission at no
> added cost to them if they buy the book. Also explain that they if they want
> us to get revenue, they need to buy it in one session, or come back through
> Wikipedia if they decide on a later purchase. We could even offer two options
> for passthrough, one with and one without a refer back to Wikipedia.
> 
> Any comments?
> 
> Regards, LouI on Wikipedia
> 
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