Global Text Project – Wiki Textbooks

Grooves writes, "A new initiative spearheaded by a University of Georgia professor aims to produce a library of 1,000 wiki textbooks by tapping the collaborative power of wiki. Inspiration for the project came from a computer science course that wrote its own textbook on XML when no suitable commercial offerings were available. From the article: 'The Global Text Project will work a bit differently from most wikis. Each chapter of each book will be overseen by an academic with knowledge of that field. Although the site will allow anyone to make changes, these will not become "official" until an editor signs off on them.' Textbooks free as in speech, and beer? Sign me up."

Its been done

[Anonymous Coward]

Connexions - online textbook repository. All XML-ized.

http://cnx.org/ [cnx.org]

And the Google Techtalk:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6852287090 518403675&q=http%3A%2F%2Fcnx.org%2F [google.com]

wikibooks - 2003

[Colin Smith]

Wiki based educational books on just about everything.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page [wikibooks.org]

Too early to say

[arun_s]

While the idea is interesting, the project is still in its early stages (only 3 books are available, 2 are incomplete).
Wikibooks [wikibooks.org] has progressed farther, but as TFA notes, this one operates on slightly stricter policies that might be useful for academic books.

Wikibooks? Wikiversity?

[interiot]

Why not join forces with Wikibooks [wikipedia.org] or Wikiversity [wikipedia.org]? Though as long as GlobalText is licensed in GFDL (they don't seem to say anywhere on their site?), then the projects will help each other out anyway.

License

[Ed Thomson]

The project will create open content electronic textbooks that will be freely available from a Web site. Distribution will also be possible via paper, CD, or DVD. Our goal initially is to focus on content development and Web distribution, and we will work with relevant authorities to facilitate dissemination by other means when bandwidth is unavailable or inadequate.

The major difference between this project and wikibooks is the licensing. The Global Text Project looks like all the content will be given away free but the project is at the mercy of the project leaders. At least with wikibooks I know the content is safe as it is all under the GNU Free Documentation License or compatiable license (such as public domain).

Re:Its been done

[StupendousMan]

I am a university professor. I don't require my students to purchase textbooks for the introductory physics courses I teach. I provide my complete lecture notes online [rit.edu], and permit students to use older textbooks if they wish; after all, the material we're covering hasn't changed in the past few hundred years, so _any_ textbook they can find will serve as a useful reference.

I write my own homework problems so that my students won't have to purchase a textbook simply for that purpose.

The bookstore hasn't broken my hands, nor has the university reprimanded me. We've just started a new fall quarter this week, and I'm still teaching.

So, in brief, your statement is not correct.

In the long run...

[God of Lemmings]

I think that this could produce textbooks that have content not directly influenced by governments, religions, and corporations. There is likely to be some level of resistance in certain places depending on the subject, but the overall result should be positive.

Re:Its been done

[bcrowell]

The reason nobody has heard of it is probably the evil college bookstore cartel.
I think it's a bit of a stretch to blame college bookstores for this. They're mostly nonprofit. It's the publishers who are really being evil.

They will break your hands with hammers if they find out you have been using free textbooks instead of the ones they sell.
I'm currently typing this with two unbroken hands, after 9 years of using free textbooks [lightandmatter.com] in my physics classes.

There are already hundreds of free college textbooks on the web:

• theassayer.org [theassayer.org] (a catalog of free books in general, not just textbooks; accepts user-submitted reviews)
• textbookrevolution.org [textbookrevolution.org] (a site specifically devoted to free textbooks)
• libertytextbooks.org [libertytextbooks.org] (a selection of high-quality free textbooks)

Wikibooks [wikibooks.org] was originally envisioned as a project that would have textbooks as its main raison d'etre, but IMO it's failed at that goal. [lightandmatter.com] Although there are quite a few textbooks at the wikibooks site, almost none of them are of high enough quality to be widely adopted for classroom use. I don't think that's particularly surprising, because the wiki method is simply unsuited to the task of writing textbooks. The killer app for wikibooks right now seems to be books about video games.