hi,

Thought the list might be interested in this: http://blog.booki.cc/?p=141

"Experimental Wikibooks Importing Jan Gerber, a friend of Booki and a great programmer (author of FFMPEG2Theora and other essential tools) wrote a extension to Booki to import books from the Wikimedia Foundation project Wikibooks. There is information about how to import Wikibooks into Booki in the Booki User Guide.

Wikibooks has been around for a long time and has been compiling collections of free books. We thought it would be interesting to see if its possible to automate the import of these books into Booki. Doing this would open up the export possibilities for the content in Wikibooks. it would be possible, for example, for wikibooks to be exported into ePub, Book formatted PDF, ODT etc through Booki.

Jan developed the code to do this and it works pretty well. We have a few issues to work out with it and some interesting ideas on how to extend this. Mike Linksvlayer suggested:

“as I’m writing this it occurs to me that it would be fairly simple to create a supplement for the book mostly or even entirely consisting of a collection of relevant Wikipedia articles — see examples of such books created using PediaPress; another approach would be to add a feature to Booki (the software used to create Collaborative Futures) to facilitate importing chapters from Wikipedia.” http://gondwanaland.com/mlog/2010/08/26/collaborative-futures-org/

Good idea! We liked it so much we added it to our development to-dos. If you are interested in hacking away at this feature, perhaps using the work that Jan has already done to get you started then please let us know!"

adam