Today I found news about a new Google project - Google Book Search. This service, available at http://books.google.com/, allows users to search for books and browse some of them online. In most cases, only parts of books are available and the whole material is copyrighted. Google Book Search also offers long description of every book, links to online stores where the book is available, possibility to search words in a single books and more features.
Currently I have not seen any books from Wikibooks there. I find this project as a real chance for Wikibooks to promote itself and its content; we should add our PDF versions there if it is possible. Google says it does not take any money for adding new books to its search engine, but I am not sure if they require ISBN number for each book.
What is your opinion on this project?
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Piotr 'Derbeth' Kubowicz
Jabber id: derbeth(a)jabber.wp.pl
Pomóż Wikibooks stworzyć największy zbiór otwartych podręczników! http://pl.wikibooks.org/
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As some of you know, I am providing hosting and support for
wikieducator.org, an eLearning wiki hosted by the Commonwealth of
Learning (col.org). A particular project started there may be of
interest to you:
http://wikieducator.org/WikiEdProfessional_eLearning_Guidebook
The Commonwealth Education Media Center for Asia (CEMCA) and the
Commonwealth of Learning (COL) recently published the 2nd revised
edition of E-Learning. A guidebook of Principles, Procedures and
Practices. This guidebook has been developed by Som Naidu of the
University of Melbourne, Australia in close consultation with Sanjaya
Mishra of Indira Gandhi National Open Univeristy.
The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) has released a digital wiki version
of this guide under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike
License.
Help is needed to convert the PDF into the wiki format, and to create
SCORM eLearning packages from it. Aside from that, the guide may be
good reading material for Wikiversity and Wikibooks users. The PDF
version is here:
http://www.cemca.org/e-learning_guidebook.pdf
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Peace & Love,
Erik
I've posted a discussion at:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Wikibooks_talk%3APublication_of_the_Month#Futu…
where I've discussed the idea of trying to set up an independent group
of Wikimedia users for the purpose of making physical publications of
Wikibooks content.
I think the time is ripe for this to happen, and for some significant
publications to start coming out of the Wikibooks project. I'm even
willing to put some of my own money into this endeavor, but I would also
like to see if there is any additional interest in those sympathetic to
Wikibooks who would like to join me in this effort.
I also don't want to be accused of abusing my position as an
administrator on Wikibooks, but instead just want to see this project
succeed and go places that it hasn't been to before.
About a year ago I made a printed version of the Wikijunior Solar System
book and passed it around to several parents in the neighborhood that I
lived in. None of them are even semi-regular Wikimedia users, but
rather just ordinary parents. They were very interested in getting a
copy of the content, but seemed to be confused about the idea of
copyleft content and such. What they were looking for was essentially a
publisher that was selling this stuff, even if it was available on-line
only. I've also been contacted by some home-schooling groups that
seemed to be especially interested in the Wikijunior books, although
some of the other stuff on Wikibooks seems to have some interest as well.
I've been waiting for what was the best time to start doing something
like this, and I feel the time has now come on Wikibooks to finally
really push forward and try to get some sort of publishing done with
this content. To avoid issues with the tax-excempt status of the
Wikimedia Foundation, I do feel that this needs to be something done
outside of Wikibooks itself, with the majority of the discussion
happening on either mailing lists or perhaps a Wiki set up on an
independent server.
BTW, yes I am aware of http://wikipress.de/ but as they are primarily
dealing with German Wikipedia content being sold to people in the
European Union, and what I am talking about is English Wikibooks content
being sold to North America, I think there is a significant enough
difference to require another group being set up for this project. I
also don't want to be doing duplication of effort here if there is
anybody else that is also working toward this goal.
If there isn't any commentary or interest from other individuals, I'm
going to go ahead and do this anyway myself and be bold, but I do want
to make other Wikibooks user aware of this effort.
--
Robert Scott Horning