2010-05-06

The English Wikipedia Now Offers Custom Books to All Users!

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 a longer time, it's now available on the English Wikipedia, for all, without restrictions.

The whole PediaPress team has been working hard in the last few months to offer our users a better online and offline experience. The book creator has been revamped to make it easier to use, as well as faster and more complete. The custom books made through PediaPress now feature color covers and the possibility to add an image, and will soon offer hard covers and color content. We've also refreshed our catalogue with brand new books and you can find out all about the new feature in the screencast we published on YouTube.

We are very happy to be able to offer this feature on Wikipedia in the frame of our long term partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation, and are at your disposal at any time for more information. Our contact information, official press release, as well as other press material (interviews, photos and more), can be found in our Press Room.

We are looking forward to even more great books to share with the world!

2 comments:

Teemu Leinonen said...

Hi,

I love the idea and your implementation of it! Two proposals, anyway:

Naturally the possibility to have color pictures in the books would be awesome!

Also when just quickly testing the service, I noticed that from articles of places (countries, cities etc) you include the fact tables to the begging of the article. I think that in a case of a book it would be better to start with the descriptive text and add the fact tables only to the end of the article.

Good luck with your project – I will do some orders, soon.

- Teemu L.

Delphine said...

Hello Teemu,
Thanks for your suggestion about the infobox on countries. It is indeed something we should consider for better readability, the same way we are looking at implementing endnotes instead of footnotes, to allow more space for "content" rather than the "notes" on any given page.

Let us know what you think when you get your books!

Cheers,

Delphine (M. ;-))