Moving Wikipedia from Computer to Many, Many Bookshelves

That's a rather large font though, and no use of hyphenation. Here is the Encyclopædia Britannica for comparison:

http://i.imgur.com/qXGfGWa.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/obu7D8e.jpg

By the way, I'd love (Google Maps) satellite imagery printed onto a sphere large enough to be able to see every house and street on earth. Unfortunately 127.42 meters diameter (1 mm = 100 m) and a magnifying glass is probably as small as you can make it without losing the ability to look at everything without a microscope or something similar.

I could never do this - push the project that far and then not print every single volume. Not sure if it is a feature or a bug of mine.

I had a lightly similar idea that I hope to implement this summer. I mention my idea here in case someone else wants to do it first (and save me the work!).

I keep just the text for the English language articles on my laptop in a text file, one line per article. It is a little more than two gigs. My idea is to compress the text using a ZIP entry for each article, build a Lucene index for local search, add a small Java web app to search and peruse a local copy of Wikipedia (or host it for family and friends) and package it all in one Java JAR file. This could provide a useful local copy of the text in Wikipedia in one handy 4 or 5 gigabyte file.

The downsides to this idea: no media files and it would not be up to date.

Edit: I use the Wikipedia text for NLP experiments, including finding entities (my own code) and processing with both Open Calais and Standford NLP libraries.

tl;dr: "He will not, however, be printing all 7,600 volumes."

Don't suppose he's planning to release the source for the scripts he's using to compile the books.