German Wikipedia Goes Down The Printed Route
In a rather odd experiment in reverse publishing, a collection of articles from the German Wikipedia is being produced in the printed form by publishers, Bertelsmann. Estimated to be priced at 19.95 euros,the book, “The One-Volume Wikipedia Encyclopedia,” is expected to go on sale by September.
While I have heard of books putting their content online, this would have to be the first time that content is being taken from, what is an interactive medium, into one that is, for want of a better word, linear. Is this going a step back?
Not if you believe Bertelsmann - “We think of it as an encyclopedic yearbook.” Considering that the German Wikipedia has 750,000 separate articles, the book would have only about 25,000 entries, and can hence be viewed as an attempt to capture the zeitgeist via Wikipedia’s users by selecting the most popular entries.