A CD of books from Malayalam Wikisource: hot off the press

Congratulations to the Malayalam Wikisourcerors, who last week released the 2011 Malayalam Wikisource CD with a selection of books from Malayalam Wikisource and art from Wikimedia Commons.  This CD, a sequel to last year's release of Malayalam Wikipedia on CD, is by far the biggest collection of free Malayalam texts available offline - and beautifully illustrated by Rajesh Odayanchal.

2011 ML-Wikisource CD sticker
By Rajeshodayanchal via Commons

Now, a week after its release, the download page has received over 40,000 hits.  As mentioned in the release announcement, this project is particularly important because a majority of households in Kerala do not yet have a reliable connection to the Internet, and so need access to digital works offline.

The CD release was announced on June 11, at the 4th annual Malayalam Wikimedia Meetup in Kannur, Kerala.  The community gave the first CD to their youngest contributor (7-yr-old Sai Shanmugham), and recognized others who contributed to this collection and to ml:wikisource over the past five years (including Atma, Su, Thachan Makan and Manojk), and the many other participating Wikimedians who helped illustrate and produce the CDs.

Hisham hands Sai a CD, as Bishakha looks on.
Image by Fotokannan, via ShijuAlex

The CD creation Process

Shiju Alex wrote about the overall process and release, and Santosh Thottingal shared a detailed description of the technical steps needed to produce the CD.  The selection was chosen and produced in just over three weeks!  Books were selected via a wikiproject starting on May 20, and released three weeks later.

The collection includes:

• Selected poems by Kumaranasan, Cherusseri, Changampuzha Krishna Pillai, Kalakkaththu Kunchan Nambiar, Irayimman Thampi, and Ramapurathu Warrier
• A Malayalam Grammar, Kerala Paniniyam
• Folklore and Novels, such as Aithihyamala and Indulekha 
• Native art, such as Parichamuttukali pattukal dances
• Religious texts, including the Bhagavad Gita, Adhyatma Ramayanam Kilippaatu, Harinama Keerthanam, Geetha Govindam, the Bible (Sathya Veda Pusthakam), the Quran, the works of Sri Narayana Guru
• Devotional songs for Christian, Hindu and Islamic worship
• Philosophical texts, including Marx and Engels
• Collections of images of food, plants, birds, maps and celebrations from Kerala

The CD can be downloaded as an .iso image, or browsed online (currently down due to high traffic).

How do you print "WikiLove" in Italian?

<< Wikipedia books are like star constellations in a universe of knowledge. >>  – pediapress

A few years ago, when the Extension:Collection was first launched, I was quite critical about it. The one with PediaPress was among the very first partnerships signed by WMF, and I recall writing worried blogposts about this trend.  Since then, my views have changed.

Recently, we have all read about Amazon.com selling more e-books than print books, so it might seem ill-timed... but this year I decided to give the "Wikipedia Books" feature the attention it really deserves on my home wiki, it.wp.  In 2011, Wikipedia turned 10 - I think it also went "physical" : more than ever before people around the world gathered for parties, talks, meetups and so on, allowing our online projects to enter newspapers, classrooms, cultural institutions, in many cases for the very first time.

In a moment of optimism, I asked PediaPress, as the official WMF partner for printing contents from our projects, if they were interested in a reprise of the coupon giveaway they launched last year on en.wp.  I could not believe my eyes when I read their enthusiastic reply, some weeks ago!

...So now we have a Wikipedia Books project scheduled for this June.   This will enable us to showcase our best contents, both featured articles and the "quality articles" which it.wiki has recently adopted... to get a free copy of our favourite collection of articles... and above all, to get together to do something useful and funny for Wikilove's sake.


guest post by: elitre