PediaPress Blog

In Need of a Great Birthday Present? Think of the Birthday Book!

2010-02-27T15:34:00.009+01:00

In our series "What kind of book can I make with PediaPress?", here is our second installment. There is one "book" that comes back again and again in the books that our users make, the Birthday Book. Not a book about Birthdays, no, but a custom book for someone who's dear to you and who you want to surprise with something a bit out of the ordinary (I've found that as we get older, surprising gets more and more difficult). People have gone out of their way to make books that reflect the "Birthday person"'s life, in one way or another.

We've seen different kinds of "Birthday Books". The first one is a book that retraces what happened in the world during someone's life. The editor chooses an event for each year of someone's life and puts all of these events together in a book. Wikipedia makes this rather easy as it provides lists of notable events per year. See for example all that happened the year Wikipedia was born, 2001. Browsing the different years of someone's life, you can choose important events or people to add to your collection and make your custom book. It's a rather nice an interesting way of looking back at the years gone by. I am sure none of us remember the events that happened during our life quite in the same way.

Another idea is to make a book that gathers all the events that happened on the day the person was born. If we stick with Wikipedia, we could gather all the events that happened on January 15th across the years. This would range from the crowning of Elisabeth I in 1559 in Westminster Abbey to the launch of Soyuz 5 by the Soviet Union in 1969 to the landing of US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River in 2009. Quite an amazing scope in events.

Last, but not least, there are people who simply put together a book with the topics that interest the Birthday person, or have to do with their life. It is always difficult to buy the right book on the right topic, especially for someone who's interested in a lot of things. Wikipedia provides such a range of articles on every subject that it becomes fun to put together things that have no apparent link to each other except from the fact that they all have a link to one person. My Birthday book would probably gather such disparate subjects as Languages, American cinema of the 1930s and 1940s, Open Source and Photography, Carcassonne and Languedoc Roussillon to cite just a few. So topics range from what the person has studied to the places they were born, they have studied or spent their holidays to their hobbies and professional interests.

In the end, the great thing about Wikipedia and PediaPress in the "birthday context" is that they open a range of infinite possibilities to make a Birthday gift that your friends or family shall never forget, and to which they can go back anytime they want.

Time to Travel! Get Your Holidays Wiki Book

2010-02-10T17:04:00.007+01:00

While following up on the books that have been ordered through our PediaPress website, I have been trying to keep a list of the great ideas people have. What are the books that people make for themselves? It's actually very interesting, because depending on the country of origin, the time of the year and Gutenberg knows what other deciding factor, the custom books we see go through our printing press have only one thing in common, they are really "tailored" to the customer. A few days ago, kleinski blogged (in German) about his first book. He put together a book to prepare his journey, starting (or ending, he's not sure yet) in Iceland. As he puts it

"And there's nothing better than to collect the stops on the planned travel route and to take, instead of seven travel guides, just one book - admittedly, not a guide, but full of information."

Winter in our Northern Hemisphere is way too grim not to think about the next holidays. You might know exactly what your next destination will be, or not. It might be around the corner, or halfway across the world, one thing is sure, there's a very good chance that Wikipedia has an article about your planned (or unplanned) destination. And who better than Wikipedia knows how to capture the specificity of a very particular place? Wikipedia offers detailled and knowledgeable information on a place, a country, a monument and... well, also roundabouts! Collecting articles in Wikipedia makes a travel guide of another nature. Imagine going through the Parisian metro and taking a peek at the ghost metro stations. Imagine visiting Metropolis, Illinois, while reading up on Metropolis , the fictional city. And walking across the "Morne plaine" of Waterloo, with the ability to recreate every one of Napoleon's moves does make the trip more exciting.

So start today, collect your articles with the book creator, and make your holiday trip unforgettable, by making sure you don't miss out on anything there is to see. Collect articles about a country, a region, or even a single city and its monuments. Whether for a three weeks holiday of for a week-end, you'll find all the info you need (and more) on Wikipedia. Make a book, get it printed , read it in the metro, the plane or in the warmth of your bed. And while you're at it, when you're there for real, be sure to take pictures to post on Wikipedia, so that the next traveller gets an even better feel for the journey.

So much for the Holidays Book, it's one of many ideas that I'll share with you in the next few weeks. Stay tuned!

Photo: Waterloo, Belgium, Lions' Hillock © Jean-Pol GRANDMONT , licence CC-BY-SA - Source: Wikimedia Commons

Hello 2010, What's Cooking on the Wiki Book Front?

2010-01-13T15:17:00.007+01:00

So here we are, about two weeks within 2010. The beginning of this year has been quiet, but nonetheless interesting. As we've finally settled down after holidays, family parties and much eating (well, at least for me, France is famous for that right?), it is time to look back on 2009 and more important, to look ahead into 2010. It's a new decade after all, what does it have in store for us?

2009 brought us quiet but steady growth. We've worked on the software all year round, while more and more people have been putting together and designing their custom wiki books. Here are some figures that describe the year 2009.

we've made more than 2000 smaller and larger improvements to the open source code
the average number of pages in an ordered wiki book was 372
73% of all orders originated from the German Wikipedia, 9% from the English Wikipedia
we shipped to 53 different countries. Our books went as far as Australia, India, Brazil, Uruguay, Côte d'Ivoire or Japan

We're thrilled to see that so many people across the world are interested in making wiki books. Geographical diversity was not the only one. The topics of the books made were also extremely varied. They ranged from "The Philosophy of Science" to "London for a Day" to "Beware of the Cuco! - Origins of Urban Legends and Other Folklores", in other words, from academic to personal to esoteric.

But what you liked most in 2009 was definitely the introduction of color covers. As shown in our little mosaic, color covers make for really personal books.

That was for 2009, 2010 will bring its new load of great improvements and cool changes.

In the next three months, we hope to make the Book creator open to all visitors of the English Wikipedia (and not only to logged in users). This will also prompt a refactoring of the Community Book Catalog. We want to produce the tools to make it more attractive so that the books put together by the Wikipedia Community are more visible for visitors. We are also working on a new version of our website, which will introduce many new possibilities.

You will be able to have a user account to store your custom books and follow up on your oders.
We will propose affiliate programs, which will allow you to become a partner of PediaPress via your website or wiki.
We will continue looking for local partners to ensure fast delivery in your country.
And, last but not least, we are planning to introduce the option of printing color contents, as well as hardbacks.

Many improvements which will make the PediaPress experience even more enjoyable and complete. We're looking forward to this new year and hope you will join us in making PediaPress your service of choice!

Shipping your books ever faster in Germany

2009-12-08T12:48:00.007+01:00

In our constant quest to offer a better service, we've been working hard in the past few months to extend our international presence and make things easier and faster for you. We have secured new partnerships with printers in Europe, which allow us to deliver your books in record time.

The first one of those partnerships to come into play is in Germany. As of yesterday, we're working with a local printer. This will allow us to offer you a Deutsche Post Shipping Service for a mere 0.85 €. Shipping times within Germany will be between between 1 and 3 business days. You also get an express option, which secures delivery within 1 to 2 business days.

It's holiday time, and it's time for you to get busy and make those books you've always wanted to offer your friends and family! In Germany, you now have until the 18th of December to prepare your custom books and make sure they get to their destination on time!

For other countries, please refer to our Shipping FAQ for more information on shipping prices and times.

(Image: © KMJ, License CC-BY-SA 3.0, Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Custom Covers For PediaPress Books, Finally!

2009-10-30T16:10:00.011+01:00

Today is a great day. Today is the day when we say hello to custom covers for PediaPress books. Today is also a sad day, because we say goodbye to our old but beloved orange and blue covers. We've loved them, we've hated them, well, they have been part of our story, they have been the face of PediaPress for the past two years. We'll miss them, but we felt that we needed to give you the opportunity to make covers that really would adapt to the books you were making. After all, custom books should feature a custom cover, right?

What is a custom cover?

Well, it's very simple really, instead of having a set cover for your book, you have now the possibility to compose the cover that suits your book's content, your mood, or the occasion.

Once you've collected your book, on Wikipedia for example, and you've clicked the button "Order as a printed book", you'll be taken to the PediaPress Website and will land on the custom cover manager.

The first step is to choose the color of the background you want for your book. You can try out a few color schemes.

Once you've chosen your background color, you can add a picture to your cover. At this stage, you have the possibility of adding pictures present in the articles that compose your book. The pictures will display in a row under your cover, and you can scroll right and left to choose the picture you want. The cover manager only displays pictures that are of a high enough quality to look good on your cover (excluding very small pictures or pictures of low resolution). Of course, we want your book to look as good as possible.

And that's it, once you've decided that the cover and the pictures were the right one, all you have to do is order, and you will receive your book just as you've designed it. Take a look at the books we've already made!

Have fun exploring the possibilities of the new custom cover manager! And as always, don't hesitate to give us feedback on this new feature by clicking the feedback button on the right of our website or by commenting this blogpost!

One Day At The Frankfurt Book Fair

2009-10-14T23:58:00.013+02:00

It is actually the second time that PediaPress is present at the Frankfurt Book Fair, we were there last year, and it's nice to be back.

As always, the Frankfurt Book Fair, the biggest of its kind in Europe, is impressive. Really. The sheer magnitude of it is something you have to see once in your life. Around 7000 exhibitors from 100 countries ^[1], scattered around 10 or so exhibition halls, it is huge. From Comics to Art books, through Education, and Gutenberg knows what other topics, the Frankfurt book fair is an event that gathers thousands people from around the world around one passion, books. Books in every form and shape, ebooks, paper books, panorama books, strange books, great books and of course, Wikipedia Books.

It is always interesting to see what attracts people to our booth. Some know about us and just come and visit, wanting to find out more about what we do. Others are drawn by the word wiki in our tagline "wikis in print" and make the direct connection with Wikipedia. Some again are just excited by amazing variety of titles on display (from New York City to Weimarer Republik and somewhere in the middle Body Modifications or The Solar System).

It is in any case always great to observe how people react to books made from Wikipedia articles. You have the cautious, who wonder if those books "can be quoted, because, after all, they're from Wikipedia, and Wikipedia is not an authoritative source". They represent the old line of caution between online and offline distribution, nothing new there, and some truth in it too. Others who just find this "so cool! I can really make any book I want, with all the articles I find interesting?" "Yes you can." They are the enthusiasts, discoverers and early adopters. Those then who think Wikipedia books should be in every single school on the planet. I like to call them idealists, with a bit of utopia on the side. Those finally who come up with cool ideas of new books to put together. They are the creative and fun. In short, from the cautious to the eager and fans, we get to see a lot of different and interesting people. Not enough Wikipedians though, we hope to see more in the days to come!

On the stand we can show you our new cover designer, which we'll make public in a few weeks and which will allow you to customize your book cover, and we do fun demonstrations of how the new version of the booktool works. We also have coupons to distribute, so you can get a discount on your next book. We're in Hall 4.2, stand G413. Come by and visit!

[1] Der Tagespiegel 13/10/2009

Create Books Easily: New Version of the Book Creator is live on Wikimedia Projects

2009-10-12T14:38:00.013+02:00

Last week, the new version of the Book creator interface has been deployed within the Wikimedia projects. We are very excited about this new step, it's a bit like a new start for books on Wikimedia projects.

Bringing Wikimedia contents offline

The Book creator is now deployed on many Wikimedia projects, and we're still working at making it suitable for all languages and all wikis. On most wikis, it is available both to anonymous readers as well as to logged in users. You access the Book creator by clicking the link "Create a book" on the left sidebar. On the English Wikipedia, it is available to logged-in users only at this stage (unless you know the direct link to start the book creator ;-)). For those who don't know, the Book creator (technically: the Collection extension for Mediawiki) allows readers to very simply browse a collection of their favorite articles and bring it to print, be it in PDF, ODF or in a real printed book. A good way to bring Wikimedia contents offline. The new version of the Book Creator is much more practical. Let's face it, the previous version was a bit geeky in its implementation, not exacty a model of usability (scrolling down to add a page, anyone?) and also not very sexy (all text and no images). The new version implements several features in a much nicer and much more practical way.

Easy to see, easy to use

The Book creator is easy to reach: when you start it by clicking in the left sidebar, it is displayed as a box at the top of your articles. The box stays while you are browsing articles, allowing you to add pages easily. You can also display the state of your book at any time and add chapters, or reorganize articles.

Add pages quickly and easily

The Book creator now makes adding pages to your book very easy with a whole set of improvements.

Once the Book creator is started, you just need to click the link "add an article" at the top of the article to well... "add an article" :)
Add a whole category to a book in a breeze. Simply browse the category and the "add article" link will change into an "add category". Clicking it will add all the articles in that category (note: at this stage, the book creator will only accept a maximum of 200 articles from a given category).
You can also add a page by simply hovering above an internal link, clicking on the link shown in the popup that appears. This speeds up the collection process by enabling you to add articles without having to open them.

The Creative Feature: Suggest pages

The Book creator now gives you ideas to make great books. The new version introduces a new feature, called "Suggest pages". When you have added at least one article in your book, clicking on the wizard wand in the Book creator box allows you to let the tool suggest articles to add to your book. The "suggest" features uses the links and the frequency of keywords associated with links in the article, and with some normalization and magic calculations, it will give you a list of articles which might be interesting to make your book more complete. Try it. Start a book with your favorite article, click the suggest article link, and let the tool take you in creative directions you might not have thought about!

Tell Me What Books You Read, I Will Tell You Who You Are

2009-10-02T17:00:00.002+02:00

In a BBC article titled "What does your Bookcase Say About You?", Siobhan Toman reviews the reasons why people have books and most importantly, what they do with them.

Apart from the fact that books may rest your eyes from the computer screen, they also have tremendous social value. Ever since the printing press has been invented, displaying books would show not only

how very learned you were - you could read - but they were also very expensive. At one throw, you proved your intellectual and monetary value.

says Ms Geddes-Brown, author of Books Do Furnish a Room.

The author points out that whatever may have been said about how the rise of the internet and the plethora of content available through websites would be the end of the printed book, it is being proved wrong everyday. Online availability of texts have not in the least defeated the power of printed books, on the contrary. We at PediaPress are of course convinced that printed books have a great future and that they help knowledge being passed around and withstand time.

So going with the idea that our books say something about us, I went and had a look at the Billy bookcase in my living room. On the middle shelf, I found, in no particular order:

A set of French classic poetry paperbacks (Saint John Perse, Baudelaire...)
A book on Tolkien's world
A book on a North Pole Expedition
An Encyclopedia of the MGM
A book on Dolphins
A book on Wine
The Devil Wears Prada and some other airport reads
A book on ''Praktische Typografie''
One of the seven volumes of Harry Potter
Four or five history books, as well as Tocqueville's ''De la démocratie en Amérique''
A few French classics (Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant etc.)
A book about how to start your own company
Some Fantasy books (excellent Trudi Canavan) and some Science Fiction

What does that tell you about me? And what are the books on your shelves? We're curious, reader, we want to know you better ;-).

New additions to the PediaPress team

2009-10-01T09:34:00.003+02:00

As you may have read in our previous blog post, we have been looking for someone to help us with marketing and communication, as well as with assisting users in the various Wikimedia projects.

The position is now filled and we are happy to announce that Delphine Ménard ([[User:notafish]]) and Gaëtan Landry ([[User:Headbomb]]) are joining the team as of today.

Delphine is a long time Wikimedian and has worked for the Wikimedia Foundation as Chapters Coordinator. She currently sits on the board of Wikimédia France as treasurer and is still very much involved in chapters activities. Delphine has a long experience with marketing and communication agencies. She also organized three of the five Wikimanias (the international Wikimedia conference). Living near Frankfurt she will be able to visit us at the office. Delphine will mainly take care of marketing and communication, starting with the Book Fair in Frankfurt.

Gaëtan has been a contributor in the English Wikipedia for a year and a half and has about 35.000 edits to his name and participates in many Wikiprojects. He is a student in Physics at the Université de Moncton in Canada. Gaëtan will focus on making sure that everything is ready in the English Wikipedia for the deployment of the Collection tool's new version. Further, he will work closely with the editors to grow the catalog of community created Wikipedia-Books.

Both Delphine and Gaëtan will work part-time for PediaPress and will assist users and collect feedback in the various Wikimedia projects.

Welcome to them!

Hiring - Community and Communications Assistant

2009-09-10T16:52:00.005+02:00

This job matches the predominant skills of Wikipedians. It involves developing projects within wiki communities as well as content creation.

Responsibilities

Supporting English wiki communities and helping them to make creative use of the book tool and the PediaPress service
Assisting users and responding to their questions via email, wiki talk pages, and real-time chat
Testing new features and creating corresponding help pages and tutorials
Representing PediaPress and working to improve user satisfaction and community relationships
Writing blog posts & website text
Spreading the word about Wikipedia-Books

About you

You should have a passion for wikis, wiki communities, free content and books. You should be fluent in written English and bring the skills to create interesting and eloquent texts.

The ideal candidate should have experience working in wiki communities, be self-motivated, organized, reliable, proactive and goal oriented. MediaWiki markup and templates should be well understood.

This is a part time position and you'd work remotely. If you happen to live around Mainz, Germany you are of course invited to join us in our office.

For more information please send a mail using our contact form.

Do programmers still buy printed books?

2009-09-07T14:36:00.004+02:00

In a recent blog post Antonio Cangiono (Technical Evangelist at IBM) reasons about whether programmers still buy printed books. This is a good question as coders are usually no more than a Google search away from the documentation they need. There is close to zero coding related knowledge in books that one could not find online. So the question is not about the content but rather if you are willing to pay for the medium.

Antonio writes:

I spend long hours working and staring at the computer screen. A printed book is a chance to take a break at night, and let my eyes rest a little. I find it refreshing. And let’s face it, for extensive reading, paper is much easier to read from than the screen.

Likewise, when I’m holding a book or have it open on my desk, I’m in “book reading mode”, which makes it far easier to immerse myself in it. This means that I’m focused on the task and can proceed quickly. The only context switch that happens is between the book and the editor/shell, if it’s the kind of book that warrants typing along. If you are reading a book in a browser tab, it’s very easy to think, “I’ll just check my email for a second”, or introduce similar distractions. I’m sure I’m not alone in this respect.

No, he is not alone. The PediaPress team is with him and so are most of the commenters on his post.

Viva Wikimanía

2009-09-07T14:10:00.006+02:00

This year's Wikimania was held during 26th–28th August in Buenos Aires. Johannes and I returned last week and and brought two suitcases full of motivation and fresh ideas with us.

Videos of Wikimania presentations are available on Wikimedia Commons, including the keynotes, the many scheduled panels, the lightning talks, and Richard Stallman's speech from Tuesday, before the conference started. The full schedule provides video links to most of the talks and sessions.

I held a presentation about the MediaWiki book tool and our service. It focused on on our past experiences and future developments such as the new UI, custom covers and the imminent launch on the English language Wikipedia.

Bibliográfika – the largest digital printing company in Argentine – sponsored the production of 200 PediaPress books, which were picked up quickly by the attendees. A big thank you to Bibliográfika for the sponsoring!"

The venue in Buenos Aires featured plenty comfortable spaces that allowed to socialize and have inspiring chats. We collected a lot of feedback and suggestions for our service. Notable discussions were about the deployment of the new user interface, publishing Wikipedia books based on the Wikipedia Version 1.0 project and PediaPress as a tool for students.

Kudos to all of the organizers of the Wikimania 2009! And now we are looking forward to next year's Wikimania in Gdańsk!

PediaPress @ the Frankfurt Book Fair 2009

2009-07-02T14:14:00.004+02:00

PediaPress will be exhibiting at the Frankfurter Buchmesse, from October 14th–18th, 2009. We will be at our booth G413 in hall 4.2 presenting our service pediapress.com. We hope that you will be able to drop by to join us either for a meeting, a talk or to view an online demonstration of our service. We are looking forward to your visit!

New: Shipping Options and Discounts

2009-07-01T18:12:00.005+02:00

We are happy to announce that PediaPress now offers more shipping options. For orders to the USA we now support a cheaper option (USPS MediaMail), and for orders to the European Union we now offer a really quick premium shipping option (UPS Europe).

Furthermore, a discount is given if more than one book is ordered:

If you order two books, you'll get a total discount of 10% on those books.
If you order at least three books, there is a discount of 20% on all books.

More requested features to come soon. Stay tuned!

German Screencast: “Gedruckte Bücher aus der Wikipedia”

2009-05-27T12:02:00.006+02:00

Creating a screencast has been on our todo list for a long time and we are happy that we finally managed to release it. We plan to release an English version soon.

The video is covered by the CC-sa-by 3.0 license and was produced in cooperation with Henriette Fiebig (thanks a lot!).

Six more Wikipedia languages!

2009-02-20T11:35:00.004+01:00

PediaPress is now live on the Dutch, French, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish and Simple English language editions of Wikipedia! Here's the official announcement of the Wikimedia Foundation.

And the PediaPress.com website is now available in French, too. If your browser is configured accordingly, you should be automatically greeted in French. Otherwise you can switch the language in the select widget at the bottom of each page.

Busy times in Mainz

2009-02-11T18:12:00.005+01:00

During the last weeks, we had quite a bit of (positive) stress here at the PediaPress headquarters: As reported, the PediaPress integration has been deployed on the German Wikipedia Thanks a lot to all Wikipedians who helped us improve our service with their constructive feedback!

And a big thank you to all the pioneers who ordered PediaPress books from our website! We had only minor technical problems, and most of the orders were handled flawlessly. But there's one thing that's causing a bit of a headache: The processing and shipment of orders currently takes longer than the 3–4 days we promise. We are in negotiations with our manufacturing partner to solve these problem as quick as possible. In the meantime we apologize to all of our customers who have to wait longer for their books!

PediaPress is live on the German Wikipedia!

2009-01-27T11:13:00.003+01:00

As of last night it's become very easy to order PediaPress books from the German Wikipedia, which is the second most viewed language edition of Wikipedia: The Collection extension has been enabled for all users. German readers may want to have a look at this help page.

Erik Möller (Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation) posted an announcement on the Wikimedia blog.

We are happy and excited about this change and we hope that many people will try out the new feature!

"All the pieces of the puzzle are falling into place"

2008-11-18T17:16:00.007+01:00

PediaPress is deployed on all languages of Wikibooks for some days now. Some early orders were shipped and valuable feedback returned.

Wikibooks aficionado Andrew Whitworth shared his first impressions on his blog: My First Book: PediaPress is here.

PediaPress and print-on-demand are here. This is it, this is the sign. When that first book shows up in your mailbox, you know that things have changed. Wikibooks is coming of age today, right now, in a way that most of us 'bookians barely dared to dream about a month ago. The work our authors and editors and volunteers are doing does matter, and will help students and teachers around the world in a very concrete way. All the pieces of the puzzle are falling into place, and the last thing we need is you: your contributions, your books, and your ideas. The books that you write will be printed, bound, and sent to people who can't afford books from traditional publishers. We're going to change the world with this, and we can start right now.

The tech community is usually not a very emotional crowd, and we are certainly no different. But reading Andrew's heart-warming post really touched us and made the many hours worthwile that we put into PediaPress. Thank you, Andrew. We are ready to change the world.

"What? A custom book for less than $10???"

2008-11-11T11:26:00.011+01:00

Feedback from the Frankfurt Book Fair 2008

As announced earlier, PediaPress exhibited at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2008. It was our first presentation at an international fair and we are very pleased with the results.

To decorate our gargantuan booth (see picture), we exhibited 26 books on various topics (from Artificial Intelligence to Zoroastrianism) generated from Wikipedia content.

There was significantly more interest in PediaPress than we expected, and so we gave quite a few live demos where we explained our concept and technology. We were especially happy to personally meet a lot of Wikipedians. In general, most people liked the idea of the PediaPress service and gave us favorable feedback. :-)

Presenting the service also lead to lots of input regarding usability improvements. And some of our visitors gratuitously volunteered and provided us with helpful tips. A big thank you to all of you!

Obviously, 500 years of letterpress printing have taught people that creating a book involves time and at least some talent or passion for writing. We almost always had to explain twice that PediaPress allows you to compile a book just like mixing a tape (or more contemporary: create a playlist on iTunes).

The days at the fair were also somewhat stressful, but this was well compensated by the overwhelmingly positive feedback we took back home every evening. Overall, the Frankfurt Book Fair was a great and very motivating experience for us. We'll be back in 2009!

PediaPress integrated on German Wikibooks

2008-10-13T15:30:00.011+02:00

The guys from Wikimedia Foundation enabled our Collection extension on the German Wikibooks site. More Wikibooks languages will follow soon.

Following the test deployment on their labs servers, this is another major step for our wikis in print mission. Looking forward to see it on Wikipedia soon.

We invite you to check it out and report any problems or feature requests on our bug tracker or discuss on our mailing list.

PediaPress @ the Frankfurt Book Fair 2008

2008-09-29T17:23:00.006+02:00

PediaPress will be exhibiting at the Frankfurter Buchmesse, from October 15th-18th, 2008. We will be at our booth E427 in hall 4.2 presenting our service pediapress.com which makes it possible to print customized books from wiki content. We hope that you will be able to drop by to join us either for a meeting, a talk or to view an online demonstration of our service. We are looking forward to your visit.

To book an appointment anytime during the Frankfurt Book Fair, please send us an email at support@pediapress.com.

Our friends from Wikitravel Press will join us at our stand as co-exhibitor.

PediaPress @ Wikimania 2008 in Alexandria

2008-07-20T17:47:00.006+02:00

Heiko and I just returned from Wikimania 2008 in Alexandria, Egypt. This has been our first Wikimania and it was really a great experience! The talks were interesting and the schedule was so crammed, that we couldn't see as many talks as we'd liked to.

Socializing and Fraternization

Even though the talks were excellent, the main reason to go to a conference like Wikimania are rather the inspiring chats and discussions with other attendees between the talks, at dinner somewhere in Alexandria or while sipping Sakara or Stella in the hotel lobby.

We solely met really nice people, and everyone wanted to talk about Wikipedia, MediaWiki, its uses in education or print-on-demand. It was difficult to find someone who had not something interesting to share.

Even one of our “rivals” turned out to be in fact an ally: During the three days in Alexandria we met several times with Jani Patokallio from Wikitravel Press, and we are now planning to collaborate by exchanging knowledge, ideas and technology.

In addition to the many Wikipedians from all over the world, we were able to meet and talk to SJ Klein (OLPC project), Jure Čuhalev and Tomaž Šolc (Zemanta), Angela Beesley (Wikia), Merrick Schaefer (UNICEF) and Erik Möller (Wikimedia Foundation). I was especially happy to finally meet Brion Vibber, (CTO of Wikimedia) in real life with whom we previously only had lots of email conversations and phone calls.

Our Lightning Talks

On day 3 of the conference we had registered to do a Lightning Talk. Each of us had five minutes for his presentation and a short question and answer session.

Heiko talked about the wiki-to-print project we have with the Wikimedia Foundation and demoed the Collection extension together with the PDF, ODT and DocBook download.

I presented mwlib and its current (OpenOffice.org Wiki, OLPC) and future applications (deployment in Wikipedias and other Commons wikis, the XML Bridge project). I uploaded the slides, for anyone who is interested.

Praise and Thanks

Kudos to all of the organizers of the Wikimania 2008! Special thanks go to Delphine Ménard who managed to solve the issues we had with the registration and our hotel, although these problems were totally our own fault.

The crowning finale of the conference was a great Wikimania open air party with music, dancing, Egyptian folklore shows, a huge buffet and “Wiki Shisha”.

Even on the airport we got to know new Wikipedians who were crazy enough to take that same flight at 3 o'clock in the morning from Borg El Arab to Frankfurt.

And now we are looking forward to Buenos Aires!

Technorati Tags: pediapress, wikimania2008

Collection Extension at the OpenOffice.org Wiki

2008-07-08T13:21:00.004+02:00

In his blog post “Books, Wikis and PDFs”, Clayton Cornell from Sun Microsystems describes his experience and impressions with the installation of the Collection extension for MediaWiki at the OpenOffice.org Wiki. He explains how to collect articles, download PDF documents and order professionally printed books from PediaPress.com.

Concerning the PDF output he writes:

Ok, fine, you can generate a PDF, but what does it look like? Is it actually readable? Is it just a jumble of text? This is another area where you can see a lot of time and attention has been put into this extension. The PDF is very well formatted - especially when you consider how basic the source material is.

The people at Sun have a natural interest in OpenDocument (ODT) output which is currently experimental code in mwlib. We are very happy that Clayton and his colleagues plan to collaborate with the PediaPress team to improve it!

Technorati Tags: pediapress, openoffice