Magnus Manske wrote:
While aimlessly browsing through wikibooks, I suddenly realized that our textbooks don't look like - well, textbooks.
Hi,
I agree that the presentation of a wikibook is important, as someone is supposed to spend more time on a book than on an article. The problem is that I've never found a practical way to display the content of a book on a webpage. In my opinion, pdf is better, because the complete book is available as a single file (this is better for the user, not for memory use!), the layout of the book is fixed by the editor, and the typographic quality is (can) far better.
This is why I'm working at improving wiki2pdf , even if it is a slow process...
Perhaps even more significant, out textbooks look like web pages. Even the downloadable PDF (screenshot at [1]) looks like a printed web page. I don't know what your textbooks look like, but most of mine (the better ones, actually) don't resemble a web page sent to the printer. Thes have this sidebar, which is not blank like ours, but contains important information, like additional figures, notes, and keywords for the paragraph they're next to.
I'm not sure if that layout is merely done to make the book longer and thus more expensive, but I'd wager there's a good reason behind it. I for one find these things useful and welcome our side-scribbling overlords.
Sidebar text, notes, keywords are indeed valuable for a book, as they tend to "break" the strict layout, and give easy access to some important information. I agree that a small set of extension might improve this. That would be better than workarounds based on templates.
As far as I'm concerned, what I miss most (even in wikipedia, as I haven't contributed to wikibooks yet!) is automatic numbering for equations and figures, as well as a way to reference them in the text. I can't imagine to write a technical book without these. This is bug 5600 http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5600 .