Only 5,000 pages? I have books that are over 2,600 pages that don't even break 2.5" (eg Machinery's Handbook). Even using standard 20lb printer paper, my calculations don't have it breaking a foot. They must have used something like card stock, just to add shock value to it.
Seriously though, turning Wikipedia into dead tree media is something that should be taken more seriously. Without much effort, relatively interesting primers on subjects could be put together with relatively little effort. Think "Cryptographic algorithms" or "Battles of WW2" or "Countries of Africa" Collect and curate a selection carefully, and throw it up on some place like lulu.
There are fishy companies that sell print-on-demand "books" based directly on Wikipedia articles, mentioning the source only in small print. I guess most of their customers don't realize that they buy something available for free on Wikipedia.
Yes, so the collector would definitely need to be creating value-added through the curation process, through the preface, index, which articles are selected, how they're ordered, etc.
Even easier to visualize: a ream of paper (for example, what you put in your printer) is 500 sheets. So, stack five of those on top of each other, and you have 5000 pages (plus a little extra for the wrappers.
Needless to say, it's nowhere near the tower pictured in the photo.
EDIT: corrected "sheets" for my previous, incorrect "pages", which changed the number of reams to five.
The latest results aren't available yet, but the most recent word count of 6 billion dates from Nov 09. 0.01% of that over 5000 pages would give 120 words per page. Something is missing.
Nor does the "0.01%" refer to the number of articles. The author's website says this is a printout of the (English) "Featured articles" (currently 3235). Neither dividing that by the number of English articles (3.6M) or total articles (18.1M) gives 0.01%.
This story dates from June 2009, but taking into account the article counts from this date (2.9 million, 13.6 million for English / all respectively) doesn't account for the disparity in numbers.
Some of the comments at the article site seem to be from the author. One of them says they selected 400 articles from the featured articles and at the time that was 0.013% of all the articles.
What I like most about Wikipedia is the random reading binges, where you get from History of Lithuania to Glass Onion (Beatles song), stop by at surface-to-air missiles and finish with the Carlsberg brewery.
Perhaps print-on-demand unique pre-made binges "100% guaranteed random subjects" are a business idea? As an alternative to newspapers in train station kiosks?
I heard about this back when it was released. IMO a much more interesting reading. I heard the guys behind it have other projects.
That kind of book provides a view on the events never before available. It's a condensed testimonial about a globalized/globalazing society and its many cultures.
He could have separated the book into different volumes and alloted different books for different topics. Would have made his and the reader's life easier
Seriously though, turning Wikipedia into dead tree media is something that should be taken more seriously. Without much effort, relatively interesting primers on subjects could be put together with relatively little effort. Think "Cryptographic algorithms" or "Battles of WW2" or "Countries of Africa" Collect and curate a selection carefully, and throw it up on some place like lulu.