I had better refrain from pointing out the irony, but, anyway, this is definitely an interesting read. Smaran has perfectly pointed out the strengths of the Wikibooks system. Just this year I bought a mandatory psychology textbook that students have vilified for having many inaccuracies and contradictions as well as lesser grammatical issues. I would never choose to buy such a clearly substandard book if I had a choice. On Wikibooks this problem is eliminated; it's pretty easy for anyone who's really bothered by errors to fire up some sort of spellchecking aid and correct the whole page, or otherwise reword weak statements. We're also much more approachable compared to things like Google Book Search, especially since about a year ago they significantly tightened access to materials. Unfortunately our full text searching is not as intuitive and feature-rich as theirs, and, as has been previously discussed, we can't have our books listed there without getting actual ISBNs for them first. PDF versions of books is a great step in the right direction, and something we really need to push--I'm talking both about encouraging authors to make PDF versions and also about sorting out placement so that casual visitors find them. Perhaps the topics list on the main page could be optimised like the list at the top of http://strategywiki.org/wiki/Main_Page with the newly-freed space used for a list of PDFs of "complete" (100% only) books. We should also consider offering per-chapter PDFs (as that makes it easier for someone to read or print a particular chapter without having to download the whole book first and then browse for it or specify the print range, things that not all web users know how to do). Of course with some large books (C++ is one of them, I would imagine) it might only be feasible to choose the most popular chapters to offer individually. Still, it's something to look into. Anyway, there's lots to consider here! Thanks for finding this. Oh, and I see I'm not the only one to sign textbook-l messages with tildes. :) Garrett On 17/03/07, Robert Horning <robert_horning(a)netzero.net> wrote:

That little note made my day! That is exactly what I have hoped for in Wikibooks since the very start! Thank you for sharing. Karl On 3/16/07, Robert Horning <robert_horning(a)netzero.net> wrote: