The people behind Wikimedia Foundation have launched a new project called Wikibooks. The idea is to find a kindergarten-to-college curriculum of textbooks that are free and based on an open-source development model.

With over 740.000 entries Wikibooks is a collection of textbooks that anyone can edit. Even-though the project is in it’s early stages but very soon it will influence the publishing industry because the material of each project is not restricted by the length, and can be easily edited and manipulated.

Everything is simple with Wikibooks. You search for a book and you start reading.
Looking at Wikipedia we know that this project will become very soon a pillar of the publishing industry.

The publishing industry is “going to have to recognize that there’s a fundamental shift in the marketplace” said Jimmy Wales co-founder of Wikipedia. “Some of them will prosper. Some of them will figure out the new regime and find out ways to add value. Others will stick their heads in the sand and get slaughtered.” he added.

Another great idea in Wikibooks is that a reader can create his own book or he can bring addition to existing ones.
The Educational area thinks that this project will rise the standards for the publishers and they will be forced to adapt to the new technologies.

“There are a couple of huge tensions that exist in the academic world,” said Steven Brewer, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts. “One is that the traditional model of publication as scholarship is slow. It takes a long time for material to get through the peer review process…As the idea of Wikibooks becomes more popular, we’re going to see a bunch of things that are already published on the Internet start to become collected there.”