What It Will Look Like to Print Out Wikipedia (We Need a Bigger Bookcase)
If you were raised on encyclopedias like we were, it’s time to get nostalgic, our fact-checking friend. Web-to-print company PediaPress is offering a new way to relive the nerdiest part of our youth with a techy twist on an old favorite. They’re taking Wikipedia and printing it out in book form and while it might sound backwards, their journey is one part art, another education and we’re into it!
1,000 books, 1,200 pages each. A bookcase about 32 feet long and eight feet high. That’s what The Wikipedia Books Project and the free e-cyclopedia will look like when it’s printed out. The project is currently campaigning right now on Indiegogo to exhibit at the annual Wikipedia conference, Wikimania London in August 2014. To replicate Wikipedia’s real time evolution of info, PediaPress will be printing live updates on continuous paper during the exhibition too.
If you can’t make it to Wikimania, PediaPress hopes to take the project on the road around the world with plans to eventually donate it to a public library as a time capsule for the digital revolution. Generations down the line, we can take our great grandkids to see it and try to explain how grandma used it… but never for college papers. Ever, we swear!
Outside of the project, you can visit PediaPress.com anytime to create your own customized book of Wikipedia articles or sections. That’s right, your very own hardcover excerpt of the Internet with a table of contents and detailed index printed and shipped to you in a couple business days. That’s what they call: full circle.
What section of Wikipedia would you print out?
