Huh?

[Norman Gray]

Hmm...

On 2011 Feb 19, at 03:40, Rob Seaman wrote:

> I'm perplexed: http://amzn.to/ff1iNr

I can see how this _could_ be both reasonable and interesting.[1]

Given a dump of Wikipedia, I can imagine algorithmically finding subgraphs with a high mutual connectivity (I forget the graph-theoretic term), and relatively poorly connected to the rest of WP.  Matthew alluded to this.  If those near-islands add up to a couple of hundred thousand words, then that's a collection just waiting to be fed into a mediawiki2latex converter, and thence piped to lulu.com.

If you did some minimal editing, perhaps not much beyond choosing an order for the pages, then you could end up with something I can imagine wanting to have: "I'd like to know about the napoleonic wars, in an account with no historiographical sophistications, and I'd like it to be bounded, please; if it can be bound, too, that's nice".  Too much Wikipedia can be rather enervating; seeing the end in sight may be a good thing.

To make this work, and not have folk shouting at you, you would have to add value, and be up-front about what it was you were adding.  If you did your page-selection using an expert, rather than purely algorithmically, you could end up with a number of potential books which represented different slices through Wikipedia (the pages in a history of the napoleonic wars would intersect with those in a history of Napoleon), and which were in some sense edited or curated by that person.  I can imagine getting that onto a Kindle and reading it through on a journey.  I don't think I'd pay very much for it, but it saves the labour of which WP link to follow next.  That sounds like a Business Plan!

Where VDM has a big fail, though, is that their marketing (as quoted here and as visible on their web pages) is rather disingenuous, and includes a lot of nonsense about "academic research worldwide".  I wonder how many people are actually deceived by it.  In any case, the marketing may not be necessary: I don't see a fundamental difference between this and lulu (Our Favourite), except that lulu sell the proposition differently, have more style, and everyone agrees they're providing a useful service.

But I don't think it can be called a scam.  The CC by-sa licence [2] doesn't stop anyone profiting from WP text, and if you contribute to WP, you're agreeing to this.  True, what VDM are doing doesn't seem entirely sporting, but we've agreed to them doing it every time we've made an edit to Wikipedia.

We should also avoid getting too pious, here.  Books generally aren't "peer reviewed" in the way that journal articles are, but instead appear because some publisher (of proverbial cupidity) thinks they can make a buck out of flogging it.  VDM probably don't have to sell many of these to cover an impressively low cost-base.

See you!

Norman


[1] If anyone accuses me of being a contrarian, I'll deny it.
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License

-- 
Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
Dept Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK