Would you pay $62 for a Wikipedia article? | Hacker News Reader

Would you pay $62 for a Wikipedia article?

amazon.com

30 pointsphr26 comments

What's really worrying is if you search for the "Editors" of the book there are over 17,000 book by them: http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3D...

They must have made an automated system that creates these books and sells them on Amazon using print on demand.

Curious. I thought of getting numbers to check rate of growth, if any.

With the default 'Relevance' sorting, it's 17,761 (as of 18:44 WET, today).

With any other sorting, it's 13,962.

Aaaaaand ... 23 days later (April 04 01:16:55 WEST)

     Relevance: 21,590 Results
     Others:    17,807

An increase of nearly 4k in a tad over 3 weeks, about 170 per day.

By date, they seem to land in batches - Mar 19, Mar 14 ...

Another 11 days (Apr 15 12:22:48 WEST 2010)

     Relevance: 21,589 Results
     Others:    15,039

Curious, seems halted, with the second number down nearly 2800

Seems Amazon put a stop to it (Fri May 7 10:34:58 WEST 2010)

    Relevance: 21,589
    Others:       154

Huh, 154 ? Checking small print at bottom of results:

This search may have been filtered to remove less relevant results. Click here to include these items in your results

OK, clicking now lists 21,589, but nearly all of them say:

Currently unavailable

Books > Children's Books > Characters & Series > Barney:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pepsi-Carbonated-Pharmacy-Oldfield-T...

Save your money for Land of Lisp by Conrad Barski, coming out this month. http://www.amazon.com/Land-LISP-Learn-Program-Game/dp/159327...

It might be. I've been on the pre-order list for that book since last October and it was supposed to be shipped in November 2009. I wouldn't necessarily count on it being released this month. Hopefully it'll be worth the wait..

Received a recommendation for this book this morning, because I had bought Peter Norvig's PAIP and other books on Lisp.

I wonder what all is in there. Definitely not just the stack article, because that is nowhere near 144 pages.

It would actually be kind of cool if it followed the link graph for the article a couple articles deep, so you could get a customized book of concepts clustered around a main topic.

I think the book would definitely become a lot more interesting that way.

Chapter 1: Stacks

Chapter 2: Reverse Polish Notation

Chapter 3: Australia

Chapter 4: Penal transportation

Chapter 5: Slavery

Chapter 6: Prostitution

Chapter 7: Pornography

(and I wasn't even trying)

Stack (data structure)

Computer science

Internet

Pornography

Bam!

Regardless, the assumption that pornography would be in every book assumes that you don't cluster the data to topics with strong clique behavior and normalize the data to remove overly-linked (aka obvious) topics.

That's an interesting idea. I saw that thing earlier today where someone built a Wikipedia Trends.

Anyone know of other interesting uses of Wikipedia?

I wouldn't be surprised if that is exactly what this book is doing.

The full book title is: "Stack (data structure): Abstract Data Type, Data Structure, Friedrich L. Bauer, Charles Leonard Hamblin High-level Programming Language, Lisp".

Go to the Wikipedia Stack article, and just read the article's links in order: computer science, LIFO, abstract data type, data structure, Friedrich L. Bauer, Charles Leonard Hamblin, high level languages, array, linked-list, overrun, Lisp, etc. It looks like they are doing very little editing -- maybe an automated pruning algorithm.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_%28data_structure%29

I don't see any problem with this, it clearly states that the articles are from Wikipedia. As long as they don't change the license they can more or less rework and distribute it however they like. There are also others doing similar things.

http://www.wissenmedia.de/wissenmediaverlag/verlagsprogramm/... http://pediapress.com/

For $99 dollars you can have the whole thing (3 million articles) in a 2" square device:

http://thewikireader.com/

I've never been tempted to type "LOL WUT" until now.

I have been willing to pay for printed copies of freely-available digital material. I bought Dive Into Python 3. I even bought a pair of Lulu-printed copies of Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby.

Repackaged Wikipedia articles, however, is pushing it a liiitle too far. Especially given the price. Especially given how unclear the listing is about what's even in there (as Psyonic said, the stack article doesn't fill 144 pages).

The great thing is they brand it "Content from Wikipedia" so you know to avoid it.

Some books (eg, Googled by Ken Auletta) require interviews with over 50 people - something away and beyond ripping off web content.

If you do, then you can give it away free, because their book is under the Creative Commons Attribution/ShareAlike license, being a modification of Wikipedia.

The real question in my mind is whether the book provides attribution to Wikipedia as the source. If not, and if the book's contents are literal copies of the wikipedia article, then Wikipedia may be able to have the book(s) taken down because the attribution clause was violated (and thus the license). I've not looked into the Amazon listing enough to know whether that's the case or not.

Did you actually use the link? In the description there is: "High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles!" (emphasis not mine). That'll probably count as an attribution.

The cover art for each of these books shows a "content from Wikipedia" badge, so it looks like they are probably conforming to the licenses.

It's a little odd that they'd state it so clearly on the cover, though, since it seems as though they're trying to exploit a knowledge gap in their target market.

I thought one of the key points of wikipedia was that it didn't limit access to information by charging for it.

You are correct.

Amazon(book publisher in question) != Wikipedia

Amazon is not the publisher, Betascript Publishing is. Looking at their site, it seems that what they do is gather articles and bind them together (with or without permission, I don't know). Here is the text from their About page:

Annually, millions of works are written worldwide in the research industry. Enterprises and scientists would be especially interested in these ideas; nevertheless, up to today, most of this work is shelved as a result of high costs. Betascript Publishing specializes in the publication of such works and uses commitment and the latest technology in order to make the invaluable work of such researchers available worldwide, quickly and efficiently.

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