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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. This could be handy while travelling by BigDXLT · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Should be a good way to kill 3 hours on a plane, don't you think? Just need some sort of script where all articles linked from some random topic up to a set depth (let's say 6, for traditional sake) are downloaded into the PDF.

    1. Re:This could be handy while travelling by MichaelSmith · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The "Add Whole Categories" feature might be a better way to go.

      Slightly OT: knew these people who owned a second hand book shop. One day this guy turns up in a Mercedes convertible. He is outfitting a new holiday house with impressive books and can they help him out? Of course they said yes, to the tune of thousands of dollars.

      So I wonder if there is a niche for printing and binding mass quantities of the wikipedia so you can line a wall.

      --
      http://michaelsmith.id.au
  2. Re:PDF Books by mwvdlee · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Exactly what I thought.
    There are a number of Wikipedia pages I reference a lot while working. Having them printed would be more convenient.
    It would be nice if you had expert-compiled article lists on specific topics, to make it easier to compile such a book.

    --
    Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
  3. Re:But what about the links! by Ethanol-fueled · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Besides your annoying drunken all-caps, you raise a good point:

    Wikipedia and Google are implicitly dependent on each other. Google something you don't know about and the wikipedia article is always in the top 3. Become engorged in the Wikipedia article, drift, and your trail of links represents your stream of consciousness -- your thought processes, which are a lot easier to quantifiy(and exploit) when you stay in the Wikipedia instead of jumping from site-to-site.

    Putting on the tinfoil hat, that's probably the reason why Wikipedia dosen't charge for the "free" PDFs as passes off the printed versions as an Ubuntu-style charity.

  4. Already done by identity0 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Sadly, this is already being done as fraud by These guys, who have over 39,000 separate titles printed, all apparently just wikipedia articles bound with stock photos. It seems to be done by machine, given the amount of books and the odd titles and stock photos.

    And they're selling them for over $50 each, with no notice that they are just wikipedia articles!! I only noticed because I was searching for books on an obscure topic and found multiple books by this "author".

    tl;dr: DO NOT BUY BOOKS FROM Frederic P. Miller, Agnes F. Vandome, and John McBrewster

  5. For ****'s sake by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    The contents page in the .pdf does not even have clickable pdf-links. What irony.