From Wiki to Print…

News just to hand that the German version of wikipedia is to be turned into print form by Bertelsmann. From a Monsters and Critics piece:

Editors will distil 50,000 of the most popular entries in the German version of Wikipedia into the 1,000-page volume to go on sale in September. When begun, Wikipedia was perceived as making books redundant, with no future for printed encyclopaedias.

Personally, I don’t get it – particularly the explanation of its target market:

… the volume would appeal to homes that had no permanent internet connection, since books were always available…

Gotta say, it’s the other way round for me – books might be in my office, or my study, or in the library. In other words somewhere else. Somehow I always manage to have online resources at hand.