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A legal scam

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pwhodges:
So there's these three guys who have written some software that assembles articles from Wikipedia into a PDF to be printed as a book - the articles should be related, but it sometimes gets it hilariously wrong - and publishes them via Amazon.  Wikipedia's licence explicitly allows commercial use, so Amazon are happy. The books are printed on demand by Amazon, so the guys don't have to lay out any capital.  There are something 54,000 of them in Amazon's list so far!

So, they are legally selling people a bundle of free information from Wikipedia (often with missing images) for £25 or more.  I call that a scam, even though it's legal.

Blog about it.
Wikipedia article about it(!)

The book that alerted me to this, which contains articles to which I have contributed - note the snappy title, and the apparent availability of copies from other suppliers (the two labelled as "used" are described as "new - print on demand", so that's OK).

Ptommydski:
That's kind of interesting considering the fact that so much of the Wiki is nonsense, badly sourced or at least grammatically incorrect. When I was much younger and the Wikipedia was relatively new I started or completed the pages for many independent rock bands I like and sporadically I still see bits of my weird broken English in press releases or music reviews, somehow having survived for years without significant editing or correction.

I hope somebody does this with the Simple English Wikipedia too.

pwhodges:
Actually, much of Wikipedia is impressively good, accurate, and well-researched.  Studies comparing it with Britannica and another encyclopaedia (I forget which) have given Wikipedia the edge.  It might not be the final authority on anything, but it doesn't want to be - hence the incessant demand for more citations in serious articles (as opposed to those on teenage pop bands).  Wikipedia is used, for instance, as a resource in the teaching of medicine at the University of Oxford.

Ptommydski:
Don't get me wrong, I like the Wikipedia a lot and think it's a terrific achievement but the fact is that unless they were meticulously source checking and scan reading before going to print it would be full of factual errors and vandalism.

pwhodges:
And the books are; the book on Georgia (the country) has a picture of Atlanta on the front cover, apparently.

The guys doing this justify it by describing it as "the Internet in print", and pointing out that a printout this month of Wikipedia articles will often be more up-to-date or correct than the traditional book you bought last year.

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