13 May 2010

Russian Composers, printed books from Wikipedia

This week I discovered that Wikipedia recently added a feature that allows you to collect and arrange articles and have them printed and bound. The interface is basic so it's feature-poor but easy to use. An excellent start! After my attempt at a short test book on Indo-European languages grew to 400+ pages, I abandoned it and created one on Russian composers. That quickly grew to an unmanageable test size too, so I split it up into three shorter books and ordered them all. No, that does not make any sense.

  1. Russian Composers, Part 1: The Five
  2. Russian Composers, Part 2: The Romantics
  3. Russian Composers, Part 3: The Moderns
  4. Russian Composers, Addendum
Russian Composers, Part 1: The Five Russian Composers, Part 2: The Romantics Russian Composers, Part 3: The Moderns Russian Composers, Addendum

~250 pages each for ~$15 each. Once created, you can select a cover image from those scraped out of the contained Wikipedia articles and choose from a fixed set of color schemes. Even with a simple list of composers, I labored over the article selection and finally committed. I'm sure I'm going to get them (in a few days!) and realize I've missed someone important. Ah well, then's when I print up an appendix! And unless they look like total carp, I'm already planning a part 4 for contemporary composers. I just hope none of the articles were grabbed for printing right after they were vandalized. As entertaining as it was to learn that Vincent Persichetti was a werewolf slayer, I wouldn't want that in print.

[ updated 18 Jun 2010 ]

Finished the books and finally put together the Addendum!

[ posted by sstrader on 13 May 2010 at 5:06:54 PM in Language & Literature | tagged pediapress ]