Wikipedia:Wikipedia book creator status
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This page provides information about Wikipedia:Books; why the in-house book generator was withdrawn, why {{Wikipedia books}} is retained hidden in articles, and what alternatives exists to obtain collections of Wikipedia pages and individual Wikipedia pages.
Background
The Book namespace with a book creator accompanied with an offline rendering service was introduced in 2009 to generate free collections of Wikipedia articles as e-books. The Wikimedia Foundation turned off the offline rendering service on all Wikimedia wikis in October 2017. Simply put, the offline book generator was no longer maintainable. it broke down all the time and had evolving security issues.(see below for alternatives)
Why are links to books hidden in articles?
Although the book creator was removed from the MediaWiki:Sidebar it's user interface remains functional. As it no longer is accompanied with a free book generator, its primary working feature directs users to order a printed copy of a Wikipedia book from PediaPress a third-party company. Editors in the discussion about suppressing book templates (Template:Wikipedia books - Template:Book bar - Template:Books-inline) valued the user experience of Wikipedia readers over the business prospects of PediaPress. The namespace and its transclusions are still retained in the hope that the WMF will come up with a solution. As a result of anticipated future solutions template transclusions should not be removed from articles.
What alternatives are there?
You can still create and edit a book design using the book creator and upload it to an external rendering service:
- MediaWiki2LaTeX provides a softcopy PDF service. Uniquely, it remains under active support and may be used online or installed locally. Be aware the computational resources of the server are limited.(Free service)
- Pedia Press offer final tidying and ordering of print-on-demand bound copies in (approximately) A5 format.(Pay service)
- Or
- For help with downloading a single Wikipedia page as a PDF, see Help:Download as PDF.(Free service)
- The Wiki-as-Ebook project provides encyclopedias for E-Book-readers created from a large set of Wikipedia articles. (Pay service)
