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Wikipedia Offers a Book Creator

Posted by timothy on from the select-all-then-print dept.

Kilrah_il writes "Wikipedia recently added an option to create a book from your chosen entries: 'That's it, the book creator has gone live in the English Wikipedia! A few hours ago, the book creator has been made available to all users of the English Wikipedia. This feature, which allows all readers to create books from Wikipedia articles, has been until now only available to logged-in users. It has been available in other Wikipedias for a longer time, it's now available on the English Wikipedia, for all, without restrictions.' You can either download the book in PDF format for free or have it printed and sent to you via PediaPress with 10% of the total going to the Wikimedia Foundation."

6 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. Hasn't this been done before? by Jeremy+Erwin · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Wikipedia is just following in the footsteps of Alphascript

  2. Re:This could be handy while travelling by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    6 might be a tad high.

    Say each article links to 10 other articles, and for simplicity we'll assume there are no circular link cycles (a very big assumption, but I reduced the expected number of links to help accommodate this).

    Then a depth of 6 means that you'll end up with 10^6 or a million articles, almost a third of the English wikipedia...

    Though you could probably develop a heuristic to reduce that a huge amount.

  3. Re:Why? by masshuu · · Score: 1, Insightful

    (all contains graphic images)
    Not porn, but close enough
    Page 1:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vagina
    Page 2:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_anus
    Page 3:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hentai
    Page 4:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BDSM

    --
    O.o
  4. Re:PDF Books by langelgjm · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm kind of suprised the only options available are PDF and ODT... would have been nice to see MOBI or EPUB formats, too, to make this more appealing to ebook users. Of course it's not hard to convert them yourself, just adds an extra step, and I'm not sure how well formatting will be preserved.

    --
    "Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
  5. no epub? by cas2000 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    PDF is crap for ebook readers. why not epub?

  6. Re:Previous Slashdot article by The+Archon+V2.0 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    A month ago is was mentioned here that parasites were advertising on Amazon print-on-demand articles from Wikipedia

    http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/04/03/2112203/Print-On-Demand-Publisher-VDM-Infects-Amazon

    Oh, now you're being unfair. Surely a book called "Vreni Schneider: Annemarie Moser-Pröll, FIS Alpine Ski World Cup, Winter Olympic Games, Slalom Skiing, Giant Slalom Skiing, Half Man Half Biscuit." couldn't be all bad, could it?