Wikipedia to hit bookstores in Germany — wait, what?

While most media are hurriedly migrating to the Web to find their fortunes, German giant Bertelsmann is bringing a bit of the Web to an old-fashioned print product.

The media company, which owns Random House and Sony BMG, among other assets, plans to release an annual print edition of German Wikipedia, selecting the top 50,000 most searched entries and fact-checking some of the more error-prone ones to bind in a nearly thousand-page tome for about 30 bucks. (Notably, German Wikipedia is the second-biggest language edition, with more than 740,000 entries, and English Wikipedia has more than 2 million, according to one of Wikipedia's articles on itself.)

English Wikipedia hasn't made the leap from the online to the tangible world, but German Wikipedia has tried (and failed) twice. One effort involved printing the whole beast — 100 volumes — but it never happened. The other idea was to publish books of entries clustered by topic — a wiki-cynic might say it was for dummies and by dummies — but this died too after lack of support.

And there have been plenty of "blooks" (a term coined to describe a blog-book effort by The Times' own Tony Pierce), but few have had commercial success.

So what does Bertelsmann think it's got going? The head of publishing at Bertelsmann Encyclopedia Institute, Beate Varnhorn, told the Associated Press that "a yearbook really can be a documentation of the zeitgeist."

Calling it a yearbook instead of an encyclopedia makes a good deal of sense. The "yearbook" designation also reveals a desire for permanence that perhaps only print can satisfy. Like the leather-bound high school kind, a wiki-yearbook would be incomplete, a time capsule and a relic the moment it was published. But at least it would be there, on pages, where things old can't be buried, revised or erased, as they would be online. Bertelsmann may be onto something if it's true that even the most constant Web user wants something permanent, something to hold.

— Swati Pandey