Breadpig

Breadpig, stylized as breadpig, is a company that produces a variety of items that appeal to geeks, most notably publishing the book xkcd: volume 0.^[1]

Breadpig was founded by Alexis Ohanian, a co-founder of the social news site Reddit. Ohanian and Steve Huffman, one of Reddit's other co-founders, were searching for expired domains for their yet unnamed website that had the word "read" in them. A search returned "breadpig.com" and the pair bought it purely out of comic value. Huffman imagined the "breadpig" as a "pig with bread wings", and Ohanian doodled the first version.^[2]

breadpig teamed up with Randall Munroe, the author of xkcd, to publish xkcd: volume 0, which contains selected xkcd comics.^[3][4]

breadpig calls itself an "uncorporation," which means "in practice" it gives a lot of its profits away to charity. "Rather than following the typical corporate directive of maximizing shareholder wealth, breadpig aims to do interesting (good) things with its profits."^[5]

In 2008, breadpig raised over $30,000 from creating and selling LOLmagnetz – magnetic poetry for lolspeak.^[6] In February 2009, breadpig donated $15,000 to the San Francisco Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals^[7] and in October 2009, raised $32,000 for Room to Read to construct a primary school in Laos.^[8] breadpig went on to raise $52,700, via the sale of xkcd: volume 0. This money was used for the development of a school room, a reading room, and a local language publishing room, also via Room to Read.^[9] As of December 2010, breadpig has raised over $150,000 for charity (including both funds raised, and profits donated).^[10][11]

• Official website