How much of this is similar to the idea of the "Wikibooks Foundation" idea I floated before the last board elections on the Staff Lounge? (More like a lead balloon that sank at sea, but I still raised it.)
There are some activities that the WMF board either doesn't want to get involved with or for various reasons legally can't.... which some Wikibookians do want to get involved with. Some of what you are saying here about having a completely independent website might have some good merit, and I am liking the general approach you are taking on doing this.
I want to make it clear that there certainly is a huge role that a WMF sponsored website for textbook and other book-length material to be hosted, and I'm not trying to say by any means to tell of the WMF off... but at the same time trying to organize activities, particularly some potentially profit-making activities, has been embarrassingly difficult to put together and at the same time maintain a distance to avoid the appearance of ethical conflicts.
Wikibooks is reaching a new level of development, and it will be interesting where the community will go from here.
-- Robert Horning
Hello Rob! how are you? You are right, this is basically the "sinister alterior motive" that I've had about this. The idea of having a separate "Wikibooks Foundation" might not have been a success, but it has been influential nonetheless. One thing I want is to have a platform that isn't dependant on WMF money or WMF developers/volunteers to run. People are busy enough as-is.
Consider as a parallel issue the fact that Google News refuses to aggregate Wikinews directly, because it is "untrustworthy". To circumvent this, Wikinews created a news blog to post it's stories (once they have been completed), and Google News will link to the Wikinews Blog. It's this kind of small step that can go a long way to promoting Wikinews, and ideally all other WMF projects. Imagine for a short moment a read-only website where "checked" and "approved" books could be hosted, and then included in Google Books searches. Think about what Veropedia does to improve the reliability of certain Wikipedia articles.
This is sort of a tangent, of course, but it illustrates the fact that sometimes our neat self-contained little wikis do need some support from other websites which are not necessarily WMF-affiliates.
--Andrew Whitworth