Home › Blogs › Jonathan Blanchard's blog

Wikipedia Books

Tue, 07/13/2010 - 13:49 — Jonathan Blanchard

Relatively quietly a new product developed in partnership between the Wikimedia Foundation and PediaPress was launched recently. This service enables users to order in print a collection of Wikipedia articles in the form of a printed book with part of the proceedings going to the Wikimedia Foundation. I had to chance to get hold of some of those printed books and I simply cannot omit blogging about this awesome and innovative addition to the Wikipedia and open-source community. Other services are provided by PediaPress out of this partnership, for example it is now possible to download rendered PDFs of books as well as single articles freely. Moreover the rendering engine is available as free software. As with all open-source projects however it is not as simple as ordering a book on Amazon (Well it can be if you are not too picky). As such, ordering books in print might require a little more insight than most online shopping.

Please note that this entry relates my experience with the products offered by PediaPress at the time I ordered my books. PediaPress is constantly perfecting their software and services and as such issues I highlights here will surely be fixed in the near future.

At the time of writing the books offered by PediaPress are professionally printed with a soft cover binding having a maximum of about 800 pages per book. It is possible to order collections of articles amounting to more than 800 pages but they will be evenly split in volumes. Right now, I have three fine examples of those books in hand.


A stack of Wikipedia Books printed by PediaPress.
A stack of Wikipedia Books printed by PediaPress. (Click for full resolution or to see how dusty my desk is...)

One of those book I made myself is, you guessed it, UNIX which is a collection of related articles to the subject. I also ordered the Messier objects book just for the shear coolness of the concept of having the entire collection of Messier objects as printed Wikipedia articles. Hadronic Matter belongs to a friend and is an early example of books from before the lauch. This same friend posted a blog entry about the Wikipedia books and PediaPress that might interest some readers.


An open example of Wikipedia Book printed by PediaPress.
Inside the UNIX book. (Click for full resolution.)

Getting a book

Getting a printed book can be done in multiple ways and this is one of the situation where a user must decide upon technical considerations which source he wishes to use. The easiest method is by ordering an existing book. Again, those takes two forms, the books from the PediaPress catalogue and the books already ordered that users opted to share. Books from the official catalogue represent a limited selection but are generally of higher quality than the average book. Which means they were checked for major defects and most of the time the articles contained in them are of good or excellent quality. As I just said, users can also share the book they ordered, for example here are the links for the Unix and Messier objects books I ordered :

Those books appears exactly as ordered so for example Unix will not contain recent modifications to the articles within.

The other option in selecting a book is to take a Wikipedia community book. Those books, not to be confused with Wikibooks, are community maintained, collections of article stored in Wikipedia itself. Books generated this way will be rendered using the exact content of the articles at the moment of ordering. Again here are the links to the Unix and Messier objects as Wikipedia community books :

Clicking on the links will bring you to the community book location where it is possible to download the PDF or order the book (And of course actually edit it since it's Wikipedia after all).

Creating your own book

The last method is actually to create a custom book, either by copying an existing book or building a new one from scratch. A convenient tool, called the book tool, is available to create books easily as described here, advanced users may prefer the plain text syntax for more control over the layout and naming of articles within a book. Personally, I started creating the UNIX book by collecting the articles with the book tool and then switched to wiki syntax to do the final layout and renaming of articles as they will appear in the table of content. After having created the book it's possible to render it in PDF, it is also recommended in the documentation to review the PDF prior to ordering. This ensure that no major rendering issues exist in the book.

Now come the part where you actually order the book. The only real complaint I would have about the service is here. In this step you are asked to select a title for the book and optionally specify the subtitle and author/editor field. It's here also where you must select an image used for the cover. And here is the issue the selection of image is for now limited to the images that appears in the book. It also won't use the cover image specified in the Wikipedia book either. In my case, since I wanted a specific image, I used a small hack by including a dummy article at the end of the book containing the image I wanted to use. I was told however that this issue is known to PediaPress and is being worked on. As such we can hope this small frustration to be fixed in the future.


Cover of the printed Wikipedia book UNIX.
Cover of the UNIX book. (Click for full resolution.)

Concluding remark

Overall this is a great idea and as an added bonus we get free PDF generation in Wikipedia as well as an open-source renderer for all MediaWiki based wikis. Ordering books however does require a bit of insight on the working of Wikipedia, especially if one want a custom book. Moreover some bugs are still lurking that could affect rendering in some case requiring review of the generated PDF prior to ordering. As a veteran open-source user I found none of those issues to be deal-breaking but more casual users might be intimidated by the added complexity. For the later fear not, it is expected for the library of pre-made books to grow considerably as the project picks up momentum. This would practically enables user to order a much greater variety of books without the hassles of customizing one. Finally, I must say that I have great hopes about this project and would like to wish PediaPress and the WikiMedia Foundation the best of success with this endeavour.

External links

Comments

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.