Perhaps you’ve heard that the magazine business is struggling? So amateur competition could not come at a better time, and it comes Wednesday in the form of a partnership between Wikia and Hewlett-Packard that will put a magazine printing press in the hands of anyone who wants to create a glossy book from the site’s user-generated content.
“We have no idea how popular this is going to be at first, but I see the potential for a huge future here,” says Wikia and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales on his blog — and then he gets personal.
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HP itself says that the new technology could allow anyone “to publish a glossy, full-color magazine for friends, the coffee table or mass distribution” and asserts that there is a demand for “Wikia’s passionate communities of readers … to enjoy information on their favorite bands, hobbies, comic books and more in a tangible print format that is both cost-effective and environmentally friendly.”
Source: Wired
The Sacramento Business Journal Has More.
H-P (NYSE: HPQ) is working with Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales, who started Wikipedia, on Mag Cloud, a service that lets people pay about 20 cents a page to create and print magazines from Wales’ for-profit San Francisco-based Wikia Inc. business. Someone can put together content from various Wikia pages and print them out as a magazine.
People can print books if the copyright has expired using another H-P service called BookPrep. To print a 250-page book will cost about $15, for example.
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