Would you pay $62 for a Wikipedia article?

[samwillis]

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.

[ableal]

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.

[lurkinggrue]

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

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

[morphir]

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...

[hvs]

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..

[phr]

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

[Psyonic]

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

[kaddar]

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.

[stse]

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/

[ZeroGravitas]

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

http://thewikireader.com/

[Legion]

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).

[zandorg]

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.

[lsb]

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.

[nroach]

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.

[nnash]

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

[njharman]

You are correct.

Amazon(book publisher in question) != Wikipedia