Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikipedia-Books/Publishing

Scope

The goal of this subproject is to develop a community-driven process to get Wikipedia into bookstores. The book tool and Wikimedia's partnership with PediaPress offer the possibility to publish selected content without too much effort.

How it works

PediaPress offers to publish books that were created, assessed and proposed by the community.

Community driven publishing

Community	PediaPress
Topic selection
Book creation (see below)
Assessment (content & layout)	Version selection & prepress repro
Publishing approval
	ISBN Assignment
	Catalog listing
	Print and delivery
Promotion
Maintenance

Topic selection

There are only a few restrictions when choosing a topic:

The topic should be covered on Wikipedia.
There should be enough relevant articles to provide a balanced discussion of the topic.
Taken together the articles should be enough for at least 100 pages when compiled as a pdf.
The articles included should be of adequate quality.

Book creation

Special attention should be paid to organising the list of articles, renaming any whose content is unclear (via [[Obscure article title|Clear section title]]), and arranging them into chapters.

Assessment

The typesetting of the book should be checked. PediaPress uses a different typesetting for printed books and offers an interface to request this for saved books. If the prepress repo contains errors, these should be fixed by either altering the (probably wrong or overly complex) wikimarkup or by reporting a software error to PediaPress.

The Wiki trust tool is no longer available. Nonetheless, books should be proofread before publishing.

Publishing approval

There should be a minimal consensus by the community before a book is approved to be published. Approved books should be tagged accordingly to be identified by PediaPress.

ISBN Assignment

PediaPress assigns the ISBN.

Once an ISBN has been published, the book cannot be updated to a new edition with the same ISBN. PediaPress allow options for specifying the cover design and adding an introductory note or preface, see also Help talk:Books/PediaPress PDF rendering. It is important that this should also be approved before the ISBN is used to lock the edition down.

Catalog Listing

PediaPress generates the necessary metadata and prepress repos and forwards those to a service company which cares about listing those books within wholeseller catalogs.

Print and delivery

Books are printed on demand. While this increases the production cost it reduces the necessary investment to get a book published, as no inventory is needed.

If an order is placed at Amazon for example:

Amazon forwards the order to the fulfilment service provide, who produces the book, packages it and ships it to the customer.
At the end of each month the proceeds and sales numbers are reported to PediaPress which then transfer the commission to the Wikimedia foundation.

Promotion

Necessary? Ideas?

Maintenance

???

ToDo

Add missing information ...
Testdrive the proposed workflow
Invite WikiProjects to create and publish books

Participants

Please join the project by signing here and list any areas of particular interest.

he!ko (talk · contribs) - Part of the PediaPress team who aims to provide the necessary infrastructure to help make this happen 10:26, 9 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Headbomb (talk · contribs) - Same as he!ko 14:30, 9 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Dank (talk · contribs) - MILHIST in particular. - Dank (push to talk) 15:10, 9 July 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Khanassassin (talk · contribs)
OliverTwisted (talk · contribs) - Have r/l experience in preparing books for publication. Interested in working on Space Exploration articles, especially Mars; classic Chinese texts, general Science, misc. OliverTwisted^(Talk)(Stuff) 05:19, 22 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]