Wikipedia lets you create books

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Books

by sz • 16 years ago

106 22 16 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

sushi• 16 years ago

Not new but something very useful.

Creating school and college projects is now whole lot more easier :P

mahmud6• 16 years ago

Any recommendations for a new book author? I currently use Emacs and org-mode to organize my notes, but I will need something more suited for book writing.

I have a notebook where I write sample code, tables, and draw diagrams. It's becoming difficult to maintain 'state' between text and supporting materials, and I find myself leaving notes such as "Table showing Foo of Bar".

Established book authors, specially those using emacs/vi/$POWERFUL_EDITOR, what are your tricks?

I am currently interested in proof-readers and beta-testers who can hack some Lisp and have a decent command over the JVM. Priority will be given to Android and J2EE hackers. Shoot me an email please.

mahmud6• 16 years ago

People thought it was worth downvoting me to -1 because I am writing a FREE book?

WOW!

jonhendry• 16 years ago

No, because what you wrote is entirely unrelated to the original post.

poet2• 16 years ago

Ignore the rabble. :-/

sabalaba• 16 years ago

This needs to have an export as eBook, PDF or DVI feature.

anigbrowl• 16 years ago

It does. Well, pdf and open document format. That should meet the needs of most people.

Gormo• 16 years ago

ePub would also be useful.

randomwalker• 16 years ago

For a couple of years I've been thinking that e-books created out of collections of Wikipedia articles could actually be a viable business. It's not going to make you rich, but it could provide a comfortable stream of revenue on the side.

I'm thinking about topics that would make good study, reference, or entertainment material, like "weight training," "atomic physics," "Bay Area travel," "Paradoxes" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_paradoxes) or "50 most interesting Wikipedia articles" (http://copybot.wordpress.com/2009/04/07/the-50-most-interest...). Needless to say, there are thousands of potential good topics.

I would happily pay a dollar or two to read these on the Kindle/iPad etc. As far as I can tell this is neither against the letter nor the spirit of the GFDL or CC-BY-SA. There are a few value adds here compared to reading Wikipedia directly: 0. the obvious one of figuring out which articles to include 1. ebook reader-specific formatting 2. for study topics, creating a more-or-less linear flow out of a web of articles on a topic 3. quality control -- checking for vandalism, etc.

I really hope someone will create the infrastructure for this: i.e., a web interface much like the one under discussion, but which also formats the books in AZW, ePub, and whatever other formats and lets you automatically push them to all the self-publishing stores. (I envision a revenue sharing arrangement with users who create books.) I will even offer to put together a dozen books for free to sweeten the deal :-)

_delirium• 16 years ago

There's unfortunately already a whole boatload with extremely poor quality control, totally crapping up Google Books and Amazon results, especially for more niche topics. They're generally automatically compiled by a script for tens of thousands of titles, and then printed on demand, attempting to pass themselves off as original books on the subject (no mention of "Wikipedia" anywhere). Two of the more notorious publishers are Icon Group (some examples: http://www.google.com/search?tbs=bks:1&tbo=1&q=%22we...) and Alphascript (example: http://www.amazon.com/dp/6130070446). Sort of a meatspace version of content farming.

(That doesn't mean a non-scammy version isn't still a good idea. But the market for bookifying Wikipedia articles is definitely currently not too upstanding.)

ableal• 16 years ago

Discussed here, 6 months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1183986 (similar 'Betascript' in Amazon UK)

(The numbers I collected haven't gone down - they're at 36k/23k today, and the "books" seem available. Actually, the listed prices now seem higher than I remember back then, e.g. currently 32 GBP for 124 pages worth of Wikipedia articles.)

P.S. also, last April: http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/04/03/2112203/Print-On-Dem...

danpker• 16 years ago

I'm thinking something like this would really make a great gift for someone.

10ren• 16 years ago

Ironically, that page doesn't have the "Print/export" box on the left hand side, which made it a bit confusing for me to get started... and made me wonder how easy the rest of it would be to use if this (first) usability issue hadn't yet been noticed... All other pages seems to have it. It's probably because it's a "help" page, not a regular page. But why shouldn't someone want to print it out? It's a confusing exception. </rant>

Wikipedia lets you create books

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