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Now, I know there's some Creative Commons silliness, but I'm not here to address that veritable pile of issues. My idea is, what if we took…Say the top 200 articles on the site and published them as an actual print novel? The proceeds could go to the site, or be divided fairly between the authors of those articles chosen, something like that. I'm sure someone already had the idea, but in the event they haven't, I'm throwing it out there.
Aaaaaaaaaaannnd go.
There's a pile of issues.
Admin, SCP Wiki
There would only be a pile of issues if the articles came in magazine form.
Legal considerations aside, have you ever tried to publish a book? Do you know how much work would be ahead of whatever person tried to do this? Do you understand the difficulties of designing it, choosing the materials, doing the layout and artwork and design in a way that looks good while making sure to avoid copyrighted images, then finding a good printing company, marketing and advertising it, setting up a store to sell it, dealing with production and shipping hassles, etc?
And then AFTER all of that is done, because of the Creative Commons License the person still wouldn't have the legal rights to their own material, and they might have to deal with people trying to sue them for including their work without their permission(even though such people wouldn't win, it'd still be a big hassle)…and then after ALL that, they would be expected to give a portion of their profits to the site and community?
This is why it wouldn't happen, far more than the question of whether or not they could legally do it in the first place. Such a person would be lucky to even break even on covering what it cost them to get the book produced, let alone making profits and sharing with the site.
I didn't say it would be simple, or that it even COULD be done, just throwing ideas around. It would be cool if there was an SCP Foundation book on shelves in Barnes and Noble or whatever, but I know it'll likely never happen.
I've been looking into it. It's not AS bad as most people thing, since we'd have to ignore the publishing houses1, but it would cost us a bit to get it done ourselves.
Amazon Createspace would be the best for Print on Demand, an eBook - and while it's free to put it up there, getting it requires PROFESSIONAL editing and a PROFESSIONAL cover, and a few other things. It is doable, but not easy. Until we have a formal organization, thought, I wouldn't touch any part of it.
We already tried a compilation of non-SCP stories, and while we got the stories, it never went farther than that.
Well, why not the actual SCPs themselves? You could do a brief foreword about what the Foundation is and why it does what it does, then pick the community favorites and present every bit of writing associated with the actual SCP page, one at a time. I'm sure I'm oversimplifying the difficulty of such a project, but I bet it would do well. There must be plenty of people out there who would sell their bodies for science to have such a thing be published, much less the actual members of the site.
There're some licensing shenanigans,to be sure, and I have no idea what those would entail.
That said, it would be interesting to see, and added commentary from the writers would be a nice touch.
There is almost no way we could possibly do this.
We might be able to do a selection of the top articles on the site, but even then, there could be issues.
Moose what are you doing why wasn't my SCP in this book? It's the greatest SCP ever even though it doesn't have that many upvotes! Also why no tales!
Joking aside, that is what would happen. You can never create a unified, cohesive sampling of content from this site without 1) somebody being pissed off or 2) putting in everything.
There is no reason to care if anyone gets pissed off. Especially if they get pissed off for not being included, because anyone not included doesn't even have a legal stake! it's all so brilliant!
Seriously though you have to just kind of deal with the fact that people are going to get pissed off.
I don't believe we could legally put in everything, though that depends on how laws work for abandoned work. I know how that works in the UK, but we're not in the UK (and neither am I!). If the original author didn't put the work under Creative Commons, which applies to at least sixty-plus articles on the site, then it's a bit hazy what we the site allowed to do with it. Plus, even if we could include, say, SCP-173, neither that photo nor its contents belonged to the author of 173, let alone us.
EDIT: Though, of course, I am not a lawyer. For all I know it's doable if we don't profit. But I am not sure we could put the proceeds back to the site either.
I'm not a lawyer either, but it's… not pretty for abandoned works. And profit doesn't enter into it.
It's also weird with anonymous works, which much of the stuff listed that REALLY problematic falls under.
It's been done before for other internet works. If all you wanted was to get the things printed there are plenty of companies that would do it.
I sing of arms and the man
Storm-tossed by Hera's jealousy
The companies would have to accept that they'd be producing it under our CC license, and there's nothing to stop other people profiting from the material. Unless you just mean printing companies. Which you probably do, come to think of it.
I mean, as long as you could do the selection fairly, it seems like it'd work out. Just take the top 200 or so highest rated. No crying, no moaning, if you didn't have enough upvotes, that's your problem.
What about a free app for iOS/Android? It would have all the articles in an easy-to-access format, and it would be perfect for those of us who need SCP on the go. Heck, we could even format it so it would look like something an agent would use out on the field for recontainment.
As for new SCPs, whenever the app has access to internet it checks the main website for new articles that have positive upvotes in a certain timeframe (basically checking that the article will be staying). So, for example, say SCP-Kajillion has +11 upvotes after a week, it would be added to the app's database.
Now, I know storage of 1000+ articles would be utter hell, so that's something I'm still trying to figure out how to manage (I thought about apps that are released for every 200-300 articles or so, so like there'd be "SCP Series 001-200" app, "SCP Series 201-400" app, etc.). This is of course to say nothing of if people would want TALES on the go.
I remember daydreaming nearly exactly this when I was bored on a plane and didn't have an Internet connection. If this were to happen, it would be the greatest thing. The greatest.
This would be entirely viable. Wouldn't even need to worry about Creative Commons issues, as all the app would be doing is downloading and displaying information posted to a website. You could set up an app to do that for basically any website, all it's doing is providing a different way of displaying the information contained on the website for your personal use, not "publishing" it in any real capacity, thus it wouldn't have to be CC licensed.
It's actually closer to 2000, but besides that, yes, this sounds doable. Now how would we manage to make it happen? No idea. I'm not really a programmer.
Software stuff I know:
You mean an offline reader for a wikidot site? Oddly, if you call it that AND the program sucked if off the site it would be legal (note the phrasing is rather careful). Oh hey, look at that:
http://community.wikidot.com/forum/t-293080
http://community.wikidot.com/forum/t-461948
I don't know if Mac is setting up FP so it's going to be developer accessible.
If you mean taking all the pages and putting them into the program directly, it wouldn't be legal and the Apple AppStare is rather unpleasant when you violate copyright. Any developer that did so would PROBABLY get their credentials pulled permanently.
(edit: And… over 3600 pages if you include tales, logs, author pages, etc. Quit looking at me like that!)
If you mean taking all the pages and putting them into the program directly, it wouldn't be legal and the Apple AppStare is rather unpleasant when you violate copyright. Any developer that did so would PROBABLY get their credentials pulled permanently.
Agreed if it's somehow putting it into the program itself. However, if all that it did was create a text file of sorts on your phone that the data was stored in, essentially a "cache" of website content you view to make it available for offline viewing, I cannot see any copyright that would be violated.
Weird how it works, isn't it. The READER/BROWSER is legal. Including the CONTENT is where it's a problem.
Yup. But as I said, saving a copy of the content on your personal device would be perfectly legal, and so would using the program to access it.
Is it bad that I want a pop-out book of "The SCP ABCs"?
I wroted one, but soon thread will eat it.
http://www.scp-wiki.net/forum/t-427149/forum:thread#post-1487733
"B" is for blinking, kids, we do it all the time! But not around 173, or it'll munch your spine!
Just my two cents, but I would download the HELL out of that app. I'm tired of scrunching and playing around with my incredibly undextrous fingers to read the newest pages on the way to school every morning. An organized, phone friendly version that would basically just be the website, would be amazing. If it was free and basically just streamed from the website there would be no licencing issues or anything right? I don't know if anybody knows about this but it's basically the same thing that Cracked.com does with their free E-Reader, right? Just updates it with the newest daily articles every time it's connected to the internet and just acts as an easy to use compilation.
Read my earlier comments, sign up for it and let us know.
Ok. Yeah, I've got an Android phone (Galaxy S) as well as a jailbroken ITouch. Should I still sign up directly on the site you posted (the posts are rather… dated. So I'm not sure if that's still a thing I should do)? Or are you going to PM me the info directly now that I've expressed interest here?
None of us are affiliated with the project, so I have no idea. I don't think it's even affiliated with WikiDot.
The second thread is more up to date then the first. No idea on the progress of it.
(account deleted)
