About PediaPress

PediaPress develops and provides services to get printed books from Wiki contents.

The goals of PediaPress are aligned with the goals of the Wikimedia Foundation. While the latter focuses on services to develop free to use and reuse educational content, PediaPress focuses on the offline accessibility of those contents. Therefore both parties established a long term partnership to pursue their common goals. PediaPress provides on demand print services for Wikis and develops open source software that advances the reuse of wiki content in alternative applications and media.

PediaPress was founded in 2007 and is located in Mainz, Germany.

PediaPress Use Cases

Today still more than two-thirds of the worlds population has no access to the internet and it's multitude of factual content. Therefore printed books are still a primary source for knowledge – if available.

Although the internet has become a vital part of people's lives in the whole world, many still prefer reading books – especially for longer texts.

Today, still more than two-thirds of the world's population have no access to the internet or its multitude of factual content. Printed books still remain the primary source for knowledge.

Various projects use Wikis to collaboratively develop free educational content, work on highly specialized subjects, or in uncommon languages. Until now, the publishing industry largely ignored those efforts due to lack of flexibility or market volume. Therfore, many of these projects weren't able to publish their content in printed books.

PediaPress makes it possible to create printed books out of every MediaWiki installation.

Specialized encyclopedias

The initial idea of PediaPress was to repackage individual selections of content from Wikipedia into customized books. In comparison to conventional encyclopedias many articles from Wikipedia have an extraordinary deepness. This allows to build great specialized encyclopedias on almost any topic in many languages.

Better and affordable textbooks

There is a growing movement of online communities aiming for better textbooks. Content is mainly developed collaboratively online. Derived textbooks promise to be affordable, up to date, accurate and last but not least customized to fit the precise demands of teachers and their students.

The "long tail" of specialized content

There are specialized Wikis on a vast range of topics. Some document and organize open source software, others may plan for a better world while some like Wookieepedia simply track anything related to their favorite entertainment topic.

They all have a devoted community in common, which produces content targeted at an audience too small to be served by todays publishing industry.

Uncommon languages

While native English speakers are able to get books on almost any topic, finding books about diabetes in Udmurt, Kabardian or Ancash Quechua can be an impossible task. There are almost 7,000 languages in the world, most of them threatened from extinction. Economic principles (number of speakers and their purchasing power) rule against a broad range of translated books offered by the publishing industry. With PediaPress, one engaged writer contributing content to a Wiki may be enough to add another book in an uncommon language.