Yann Forget wrote:
Hi,
Piotr "Derbeth" Kubowicz wrote:
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?
Google only accept books from official, registered published. I don't think they will accept anything from Wikibooks or any other Wikimedia projects for that matter.
Regards,
Yann
I have no idea what an "official, registered publisher" might be, but I don't think it is as difficult as you or others may percieve here. The point is that Wikibooks needs to get into the printed publication world, at least partially, in order for this content to be recognized. The ISBN numbers and such are stuff that I'm trying to work with, but I'm trying to go slowly on that front mainly to avoid steping too hard on too many toes.
Frankly at this point, I don't see why Google couldn't be made aware of the WikiPress project for de.wikipedia, as they do have ISBN numbers (for admittedly German langauge content). And you can order any of those books from Amazon.com or any other retail bookstore if you are interested in it.