PediaPress GmbH is a software development and print-on-demand company located in

Mainz Mainz (; #Names and etymology, see below) is the capital and largest city of the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate, and with around 223,000 inhabitants, it is List of cities in Germany by population, Germany's 35th-largest city. It lies in ...

, Germany. The company is a spin-off of Brainbot Technologies AG. It allows users to create customized books from wiki content using an automated

PDF Portable document format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe Inc., Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, computer hardware, ...

file builder and print-on-demand (PoD) technology. PediaPress maintains that it is not a publisher and does not review the content of any printed books or other works offered through its tools but may remove content it deems to be illegal or inappropriate. PediaPress and the

Wikimedia Foundation The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. (WMF) is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered there as foundation (United States law), a charitable foundation. It is the host of Wikipedia, th ...

became partners in December 2007, and a proportion of the sales income of each book is donated to the Foundation.

Origins

PediaPress was established in July 2007 to provide an online service that enabled Web users to create customized books from wiki content using direct

web-to-print Web-to-print, also known as Web2Print, remote publishing or print e-commerce is commercial printing using web sites. Companies and software solutions that deal in web-to-print use standard e-commerce and online services like hosting, website desig ...

technology. Users were able to use the Wikipedia Book Creator tool to arrange the order of the articles and specify the cover details. The price of each unique book depended on the number of pages. Books were ready for shipment within a few working days. PediaPress and the

became partners in December 2007. PediaPress's software was initially integrated into

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a free content, free Online content, online encyclopedia that is written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Founded by Jimmy Wales and La ...

, and made accessible in the navigation sidebar of every page via a "create a book" button. PediaPress had contracted with

Lightning Source Lightning Source is a printer and distributor of print-on-demand books. The company is a business unit of Ingram Content Group. Originally incorporated in 1996 as Lightning Print Inc., the company is headquartered in La Vergne, Tennessee, Unit ...

, 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 any of the millions of articles on Wikipedia in English alone.

References

External links

PediaPress website

PediaPress code repository
{{Use dmy dates, date=January 2020 Printing companies of Germany Digital press Companies based in Mainz Wikipedia German companies established in 2007