Buying Wikipedia in hard copy would cost you $500,000

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Some people might call it a waste of time, others, "a poetic gesture toward the futility of the scale of big data." Either way, it's clear that printing out Wikipedia is hard. The latest person to attempt this feat is Michael Mandiberg, an interdisciplinary artist whose exhibition on the subject — titled From Aaaaa! to ZZZap! — opens at New York's Denny Gallery this week.

The exhibition doesn't actually feature a complete, printed copy of Wikipedia. Instead, according to the gallery's description of the work, it "draws attention to the sheer size of the encyclopedia’s content and the impossibility of rendering Wikipedia as a material object in fixed form." Mandiberg's approach has been to code software that renders the online encyclopedia into book-sized chunks, and then upload these to self-publishing platform Lulu.com. Fans will then be able to order individual volumes for $80 a pop. This sounds relatively reasonable, but it does mean that buying the entire set — estimated by Mandiberg to eventually cover some 7,600 books — will cost $500,000. Still, that's a saving of around $100,000 compared to ordering each volume individually.

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