http://www.wnyc.org/shows/bl/episodes/10252005
Textbook Economics
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, the online, user-edited encyclopedia
-explains Wikipedia's new venture, Wikibooks
» Wikibooks
» Wikipedia
There's some naivte here on the part of callers --an adjunct literature professor saying students will get a cheaper book of readings. Not in the short term since so much of literature content revolves around copyrighted works.
And to the extent that Wiki's are text-based, devolved around the word, then for humanities based courses, many students, will want to print. Printing isn't cheap as anyone who's bought toner or used Kinko's will tell you.
That said, the development model is intriguing and the fact that since the content is open source, professors and students can inscribe into them, then you have something different than a static hunk of content.
What might be best are not finished Wikibooks, but starter books that a class can enter and make their own.
needlessly restrictive license
I really like the principle of wikibooks. I also think that printing the books may not become a problem. At some point, a print on demand publisher may offer cheap printed editions via the Internet.
But I don't like the license. Wikibooks would be much better under the Creative Commons ShareAlike license instead of the GNU Free Documentation License. The GNU FDL places so many restrictions on the formatting of the text, and it may make it difficult to produce rich multimedia versions. It's needlessly overly complicated. I would never use this license for anything.
needlessly restrictive license
Then create an account on wikibooks and do something about it. On Wikipedia there is already a campaign running to get people to dual or multi license their work, you could pick that up and take it to wikibooks as well.
(http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/User:Kwhitefoot)
thanks
for the invite. but i'm already involved in a project working on text under a copyleft license. just expressing my opinion that it will cause problems later on, although you have to give stallman credit for coming up with it when no one else was licensing text.