About a week ago I posted a link to a free data mining textbook. Hacker News got wind of the book as well, and I am guessing a flood of traffic hit the textbook’s site. The flood happened to take the site completely down for a couple of days. It was a shame because the book is really good.
If you frequently read this blog, you will notice it has quite a number of links to free online textbooks. Each free online textbook is available a bit differently. Most are PDF downloads (either by chapter or the entire book) hosted at some person’s personal website or somewhere on a university’s website.
Here is my question. Does the web have a publishing platform for textbooks? Is there a startup working on something like this?
I am aware of wikibooks, but I just don’t hear much about the quality of the books. As a matter of fact, I just don’t hear much about wikibooks.