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Some in education think a project like Wikibooks gives academics new outlets for their research and puts a great deal of pressure on traditional textbook publishers to adapt to new technologies. But where Google's project is a digital database of often copyrighted works, Wikibooks' material is all work that has been made free to the public. Google has been building its library and print projects since last year. Naturally, Wikibooks isn't the only effort to amass a vast collection of digital books.

"I would consider it to be mission accomplished when we could point and say, 'Well, you could teach yourself, or someone could teach you using these materials, (anything) from the kindergarten to the university level.'" Because the books are digital and open source, any teacher can decide to assign one and simply point students to PDFs they can print.īut Wales is the first to acknowledge that the project is several years away from maturity. The topics covered range from biology to economics in New Zealand. Today, Wikibooks contains 11,426 submissions. "All sorts of geeky people, basically," he said. Wales explained that the Wikibooks authors-whom he calls "volunteers"-are professionals from many fields, college and graduate students and professors. In each case, the idea is that any Wikibooks reader could create his or her own book or make edits to an existing title. The hope is that by turning the Wikibooks keys over to a worldwide community of writers and editors, the project will eventually contain tens of thousands of books and smaller entries on a wide range of topics. Others will stick their heads in the sand and get slaughtered." Some of them will figure out the new regime and find out ways to add value. The publishing industry is "going to have to recognize that there's a fundamental shift in the marketplace," he added. "The purpose is really contained in the word 'freely licensed,' which is to make available to anyone in the world, in any language, a curriculum that they can copy, redistribute and modify, for whatever purpose they may have, for free," Wales said. Yet because of Wikibooks' digital model, in which material written for the project can be as short or as long as needed, and be easily manipulated, read and edited, Wales and others believe it can pose a major challenge to the publishing industry's hold on the world of textbooks. It's their attempt to create a comprehensive, kindergarten-to-college curriculum of textbooks that are free and freely distributable, based on an open-source development model.Ĭreated in the same mold as the Wikipedia project-the open-source encyclopedia that lets anyone create or edit an article and that now has nearly 747,000 entries in English alone-Wikibooks is still in its earliest stages. You could go to a university bookstore and snag a used copy you could drop a few dollars on a new one at or you could track down some old college chums and ask for their copies.īut if Jimmy Wales and his colleagues at the Wikimedia Foundation have anything to say about it, you could have another way to go-the Wikibooks project. Product TechNotes and FAQs External Linksīentley LEARN Server Comments or Corrections?īentley's Technical Support Group requests that you please confine any comments you have on this Wiki entry to this " Comments or Corrections?" section.If you found yourself needing an old biology textbook and couldn't locate your battered copy from college, you'd have a few options. In ProjectWise admin click on Applications  for Acrobat PDF right click and select Properties  Select the action TAB for the Open action select the version of Acrobat Reader you would like to use & the same thing for View.C:\Program Files\Adobe\Reader 8.0 & C:\Program Files\Adobe\Reader 9.0) A new version installation of Adobe Reader does change paths (i.e.

then you will need to change the path to the version you would like ProjectWise to use. If you change the version of adobe reader from 8.0 to 9.0 or have installed both version on the same machine. Multiple version of Adobe Reader can be installed on a client’s machine.