Media conglomerate Bertelsmann (which owns Random House, among other things) has announced plans to put out a stripped-down offline version of the German Wikipedia later this year with the goal of appealing to "new target groups, including young people." Now for what I know is that young people of any age do not like to read books casually, it is even more farfetched an idea that these same young people will be willing to pay $31 on a book that is a brief of a website they can access for free. The complete Wikipedia won't even be printed. While the German version of the site has three-quarters of a million entries, only a few will be printed (the New York Times seems to think 25,000 entries will end up in the book, while the AFP suggests that it's 50,000). But wait, there's more! These won't even be the full entries, just 15-line abbreviated summaries of each topic.

Bertelsmann will give €1 to Wikimedia Deutschland for each copy of the book sold. It remains to be seen how this book will be received among the German audience.

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