This morning I was playing around with a relatively recent Wikipedia feature that allows you to assemble up to 500 pages of articles into a "book". You can then download that book as a PDF or you can pay to have it printed and shipped to you. This got me to thinking: Would this be a useful ancillary product for a (TV-studies) textbook? Fr'instance, I'm currently revising *Television: Critical Method and Applications* (Routledge, 2011). Here's how I might put the Wikipedia book feature to use: 1. I could search for all the terms in the *TVCM&A* glossary. Then I could collate them into a single PDF file and post it on the companion Website. Users could access it through a browser and/or download it to their own computers and/or electronic readers. This would be a *searchable* PDF, thus allowing students/teachers to buzz through the PDF and find additional info on the glossary terms. 2. A similar PDF file could be compiled with all the proper-name (people, companies, TV shows, etc.) articles. 'Course, users could just search Wikipedia directly for this information and find more up-to-date articles and Wikipedia is not 100% accurate; but it seems to me that it still might be handy to have all that info collated into one PDF. Another feature that the Wikipedia book function offers is the ability to pay to have the collection itself printed. I don't know if a printed collection of articles would be a useful supplement to a textbook or not, but it's a pretty cool concept. I'd be curious to hear the thoughts of TV/film studies teachers. Would you and/or your students use this material if it were made available at no cost? P.S. It's perfectly legal to make such quasi-commercial use of Wikipedia's articles. They're all published under a Creative Commons "share and share alike" license. That is, you can use them pretty much as you wish, as long as you don't try to copyright them as your own work and restrict others' use of them. -- Jeremy Butler www.TVStyleBook.com www.ScreenLex.org www.ScreenSite.org www.TVCrit.com www.ShotLogger.org www.AllThingsAcoustic.org Professor - TCF Dept. - U Alabama ---- Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite http://www.ScreenSite.org