PediaPress

PediaPress GmbH is a software development and print-on-demand company located in Mainz, Germany. The company is a 100-percent subsidiary of Brainbot Technologies AG. As of October 2014 its website has a Catalog page listing a selection of Featured Books from our Catalog edited by Wikipedians and other users. Over 4,000 books are listed as pages in Category:Wikipedia books (community books).

PediaPress was established to provide an online service that enabled Web users to create customized books from wiki content, an example of web-to-print technology. According to the German edition of PC World, the price was €8.00 for the first 100 pages, plus €3.00 for each additional 100 pages.

PediaPress and the Wikimedia Foundation were partners from December 2007. PediaPress's software was integrated into Wikipedia, and made accessible in the navigation sidebar of every page via a "create a book" button. PediaPress had contracted with Lightning Source, a subsidiary of Ingram Industries, to print the books. PediaPress established a long term partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation. A portion of the proceeds of each book was donated to the Wikimedia Foundation to support their mission.

Initially, the ability to create books from the English version of Wikipedia was exclusive to signed in users, because of scalability issues. But later anyone could create books from the over 4 million articles on Wikipedia in English alone.

Users arranged the order of their articles, chose a cover photo/color and gave the book its title and an editor‘s name. The price of the unique books depended on the number of pages and started at $8.90. Books were ready for shipment within two working days. PediaPress offered paperbacks and hard-covers with color images. Users can add own content, such as forewords.

Users could create the book without leaving Wikipedia. A “create a book” button was added in the print/export section of Wikipedia‘s left navigation sidebar that brought them to the book creator. When browsing the site, users could add articles to the book by clicking the “Add the Page” button.

The PediaPress.com web-to-print service worked on all MediaWikis that had installed the Collection extension. To check whether a wiki supports PediaPress, users could look for a box entitled “Create a book” in the navigation sidebar. Some sites offering the service included the German Wikipedia, Wikibooks, the OpenOffice.org Wiki and extending it to all language editions of Wikipedia was proposed.

PediaPress was not a publisher, but instead provided users with tools to order and share free or own content. Since PediaPress was not a publisher, PediaPress did not review the content of any printed books or other works offered through PediaPress tools. PediaPress expected all content to be consistent with their Terms and Conditions and they reserved the right to remove content they deemed to be illegal or inappropriate.