[Web4lib] German Wikipedia to be published in book form?

[Campbell, James (jmc)]

Maybe ironic, but Wikipedia is hoping it's also profitable. They get a Euro (so $1.60+) for every copy that's sold.  The German Wikipedia is the second largest after English with almost 3/4 million articles and they're only going to include the basic facts out of the selected 50,000, so this is pretty much a teaser.  They've already done two complete snapshot editions on CD-ROM, so there's some precedent.

The really ironic thing is that it's being published by a subsidiary of the encyclopedia publisher, Bertelsmann. Bertelsmann has spent a lot of time trashing Wikipedia in the press and they also got caught a couple of years ago stealing text from Wikipedia for their article on the newly elected pope.

      - Jim Campbell

      Digital Access Librarian | Librarian for German
      University of Virginia Library | Charlottesville, VA 22904-4112

      513 Alderman | campbell at virginia.edu | 434-924-4985


-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org [mailto:web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of B.G. Sloan
Sent: Tuesday, April 22, 2008 3:39 PM
To: web4lib at webjunction.org
Subject: [Web4lib] German Wikipedia to be published in book form?


Kind of ironic:

"Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia written by volunteers, is to be published in Germany as a book for people who prefer turning pages to clicking links, publishing multinational Random House said Tuesday. Editors will distil 50,000 of the most popular entries in the German version of Wikipedia into the 1,000-page volume to go on sale in September. When begun, Wikipedia was perceived as making books redundant, with no future for printed encyclopaedias."

http://tinyurl.com/6bzfxu

Bernie Sloan


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