Thursday, October 2, 2008

Wikibooks in Print

I've found out this morning from Brianna's awesome blog that some of our featured books on Wikibooks have been independently published and are available for sale from Amazon:

This is great news, in general, although there are a few things that I obviously wish were different. For instance, we aren't a "project of Wikipedia", but instead are projects of the Wikimedia Foundation. Of course, using the word "Wikipedia" does help the books bank on the popularity of that project, and we aren't totally unrelated to WP either.

My question is, has anybody seen or bought any of these books? What is the quality like on them? 25$ seems a little bit steep to pay for a book that was written for free, but it's a business decision from the people who are doing the publishing, so whatever works for them.

If anybody else knows anything about this, or if you see any more books like this, let me know. It's good to keep track of things!

2 comments:

  1. hi whiteknight,

    i am very surprised about this news. i think it's great. :)

    in the german wikibooks there are some notes of a publishing company who would like to print some books. it would be "book on demand". when there are a few books which are printable (i don't know exactly, now, but i think they wrote it should be 8 to 10 books) they will begin to layout cover and perhaps make some little advertisement. the price for about 100 pages (no colour pages) would be 7,30€. authors would get 40% discount on the books. and profits shall be spent to wikimedia foundation as it would be too difficult to divide and to distribute to the authors.

    well, whether they will do what they wrote i don't know. but i think that would be great. :D

    kind regards,

    -- ~~~~

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  2. i think there are a lot of mistakes in my further comment. please ignore them ;) you're also allowed to improve them :)

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