German publishing giant Bertelsmann AG said Wednesday it planned to publish a one-volume reference book containing the best of the Germany version of the popular online encyclopedia.

The 993-page book will contain approximately 50,000 definitions and 1,000 illustrations and will be priced at about 20 euros ($32.18 Cdn), according to the German chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation, the group behind the ncyclopedia.

Rather than drawing on the whole of Wikipedia's Germany edition - which contains some 740,000 entries, the book will reference the most-searched terms from the last year, said Beate Varnhorn, the head of publishing at Bertelsmann Encyclopedia Institute.

"A yearbook really can be a documentation of the zeitgeist," she said.

Wikipedia is best known for drawing from a community of writers around the world to contribute to thousands of subjects to the online reference source.

The move to publish a print version of even part of the encyclopedia is unusual because many of the features that make Wikipedia unique would be lost in the process.

There would be no hyperlinks allowing readers to click on links to related information. The articles presented would also be static, in contrast to the constantly updated entries in the online version.

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Posted at 10:19AM Apr 24, 2008 by Kevin P McAuliffe in Astound  |  Comments[0]