Customized Wikibooks are awesome

Last night the internet failed in our apartment and is still down. Because of this, I ran into the office today (a Saturday) to download a bunch of files to do some much-needed background reading on some topics.

This lead me to an interesting question, one which I had not yet thought of: how can I download Wikipedia pages in a format that makes for easy offline access?

A very quick Google search gave me a surprising answer: make your own book from Wikipedia pages!

Here's how it works. (I'll skip the actual details and let you read it straight from Wikipedia's help files. However, I will explain the process of making your own book.) After you activate the book creater, you simply navigate to any Wikipedia page and click the button on the top of the page that asks if you want to add the current page to your book. Do this for as many pages as you'd like.

When you're ready to access your book, you can do it online, or export it to a number of formats for offline viewing, such as PDF or an Open Document format. I thought that the PDF was beautufilly rendered. It even included all reference information.

There are other options with this tool too, such as sorting your articles into chapters or naming your book. I believe that you can share it with others as well.

Cheers to you, Wikipedia, for creating an awesome and useful feature!