Nice to see this list become so active... I wonder sometimes if Erik is just ribbing us into talking more, but in any case the renaming thing seems to me to be a tempest in the bathwater (the baby is fine and growing).
This sort of reminds me of a story a greenpeace activist wrote about a convention, where it was decided that "ChemLawn" just needed to change their name (and they did, now they're "Truegreen"). It's still Chemlawn, of course. Likewise, renaming the project won't make more Wikipedians burst through the door, because Wikibooks is just really different from Wikipedia. With the exception of Wikispecies (which is a metadata project built by biologists), we are the only project that's named in the plural, and that plurality shows in how things happen here: we Wikibookians tend to just work in our little corner, and don't have hundreds of people popping by and adding a tidbit here and there to the things that are on our watchlists. Going to a random page isn't likely to be an interesting read (not that random page searching is all that much fun on Wikipedia as it used to be), because a random page is going to be a page of some book that you need to read from the start. It's just different -- inherently so -- and rebranding will do nothing but annoy the current volunteers, and cause trobles with everyone's external links and bookmarks.
Books for any topic and any age group -- and thank you for the trip down memory lane... I *loved* SRAs when I was a little guy! -- require an author or group of authors. We can find those by dropping notes to people in our neighborhood (your child's teacher, your mechanic, the farmer at the farmer's market, etc.), or by trying to build relationships with other non-profit organizations (like Cary Bass is trying to do with the AARP). Or start a letter-writing campaign to Laura Bush ("be bold in propagandizing").
We've had a lot of class projects going on lately (with at least one good book as a result!), and we can build on that tradition as a path towards building more wikibooks.
-johnny.
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