I've found an interesting website today called
vectorsite.net
(
http://www.vectorsite.net/) that contains a number of nice but
sparsly-formatted writings, all released into the Public Domain. Some
of his works are not useful to Wikibooks, but he has a number (about
computing, science, and mathematics) which I think would be very very
useful for us. Plus, the lack of complicated formatting means that it
should be very easy for us to translate to wikitext and upload them at
wikibooks.
I think I am going to do this for a few books (there are books on Awk
and C programming that I am particularly interested) probably starting
next week. I'll try to get a bot together to do the translation. If
anybody wants to help, or suggest any books from this site to import
as well, let me know. I'm also going to send a friendly email to the
site's owner telling him that we're using his materials (and invite
him to become a wikibookian!).
--Andrew Whitworth