[Fhsst-authors] Re: FHSST books and WikiBooks

[Mark Horner]

Hi Karl

I think WikiBooks is awesome! Although I haven't contributed much to any of
the books that were started there I follow developments quite closely. 
Before I
get sidetracked - it would be great to have someone at WikiBooks to talk 
to about
the content, development etc. I would also be keen on any collaboration 
which might produce the
books faster because that way we all win.

We (FHSST - http://www.nongnu.org/fhsst) are working on 3 books, 
Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry, at the moment. There are 3 other 
books in the pipeline, Computer Literacy, Computer Programming
and Biology (Life Sciences). Everything we write will be released under 
the GFDL and
I thought the easiest way to release it back to the community would be 
to upload
what we have done to WikiBooks. So - yes we will upload everything to 
WikiBooks.

We were quite nervous about actually developing the books from scratch 
on WikiBooks
originally though, in retrospect, this probably would have suited our 
purpose just as
well as our current system i.e. LaTeX, CVS and lots of email :) The only 
problem is our
priority is a printed text and having LaTeX content makes it easy to 
produce a real book.

The actual migration of the FHSST Physics content to WikiBooks was 
kindly done by the Open
Source Division of the Shuttleworth Foundation who need online content 
for their tuXlabs
project ( http://www.tuxlabs.org.za ). Basically we need Wikiversity but 
we also need to produce
printed materials as the penetration of computers in SA schools isn't 
high enough yet.

We wanted to produce printed materials, the tuXlabs needed online 
content, so we teamed up.

For the remaining content we need to develop there is quite a lot of 
stuff written in other WikiBooks
that we will use (license permitting of course) but our (my) goal is 
actual printed textbooks.

One astounding fact (IMHO) is that without the publishers', editors' and 
authors' royalties we
can print hardcover textbooks in black and white for R15 ~ $3 ~ 2 euros 
per book! So we are out
to make the world a better place through education :)

Cheers,

Mark


Karl Wick wrote:

> Dear Mr. Mark Horner or Spencer Wheaton;
>
> I'm the guy who got WikiBooks rolling, and noticed some of your
> material being uploaded on the following page:
>
> http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/FHSST_Physics
>
> I'm very happy about this and would like to be involved in the line of
> communication if possible. Is there a plan to upload all of the book
> or to develop materials on the WikiBooks site?
>
> I have never had the chance to visit Africa but it has long been a
> dream of mine, especially South Africa, even though people have tried
> to dissuade me because of the supposedly high level of crime.
>
> Karl Wick
>
> PS I was the main original author of our Physics Study Guide on
> WikiBooks, not that I really know anything about physics:
>
> http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Physics_Study_Guide
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Fhsst-admin-priv mailing list
> address@hidden
> http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/fhsst-admin-priv
>
>