Brion wrote:

I thought the purpose of Wikibooks was to create original, freely licensed (FDL) textbooks.

That is our main mission, yes. But anything else book-wise a student may be required to have in the classroom is also fair game (shorter works, such as speeches, could be organized into a book of speeches).

For example, if students are required to read The Scarlet Letter then Wikibooks should have that and eventually annotate it (when to annotate is still a bit controversial; IMO we shouldn't require annotation right away). We also aim to create extensive booklet summaries of different works (akin to Cliffs Notes), with an emphasis on works that are still under copyright.

If annotated public domain works are within this mission, then great, start putting in them books!

We need three software features to make this successful in the long term; the ability to create wiki books, an annotation feature, and a source:namespace that limits edits to logged-in users.

But in the meantime we could place public domain books under "source:" page titles, have boilerplate div-based annotation and limit hard-coding of navigation links to a single link per module which links back to the TOC/Index page of the book. Protection from anon edits isn't a real issue right now, but may become more important as the number of daily edits increases. This is a hack but it should work in the short term.

But it's a bit of a surprise to me, and probably to many others. Perhaps we need a clearer WikiMedia Project Map of some sort so the left hand knows what the right is doing. :)

This is a great idea!

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)