Wikibooks:Reading room/Proposals/2013/April

Support ePub conversion?
Currently, because of security reasons, ePubs cannot be uploaded to the Commons. What if we have a feature to turn our books into ePubs? If we can do PDF, why not ePub as well? I've peeked inside an ePub file with 7zip and apparently, it consists of a bunch of HTML pages, a CSS page, a JPG and a couple of XML pages. I'm clueless about these matter, though. Is that manageable? Kayau (talk · contribs) 09:08, 5 April 2013 (UTC)
 * ePub exporting was turned on for wikipedia but was later turned off (I couldn't find why). I know it is enabled on wikivoyage (e.g. go to  and see "Download epub"). So technically it should be possible. I would support allowing epub exporting here. --Bequw (discuss • contribs) 03:14, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

Book proposals
What about collections of essays? --Dan Bolser (discuss • contribs) 22:01, 5 April 2013 (UTC)


 * My understanding is that a simple collection does not make a text book (note that I'm well aware of blatant violations of our Wikibook's definition) and mostly will have been already discussed and documented on deletion process logs.
 * An essay also is not really teaching material but only the exposition of a particular and solitary view point. A text book may also be an exposition of an opinion (with severe limitations) but on Wikibooks they are prevented from enforcing only a single view point. --Panic (discuss • contribs) 22:48, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

Google Summer of Code proposal to improve Extension:BookManager
Hi, I'm Molly White (or User:GorillaWarfare, mainly on enwiki). I'm working on a proposal for this summer's Summer of Code or Outreach Program for Women. For my project, I will create a method of organizing books that groups them into a single unit. This will ideally replace the somewhat complex and arbitrary collection methods that Wikibooks and Wikisource typically use. Although these methods do work pretty well for reading/navigating Wikibooks and Wikisource books online, it's very difficult to take advantage of them when it comes to printing/exporting, watchlisting, deleting, or protecting entire books (see dependencies of bug 15071). Furthermore, this extension will allow for metadata to be collected neatly for each book.

I will achieve this by modifying and improving Extension:BookManager, a very in-development and currently unstable extension, so that it can be deployed. I'm hoping to receive feedback on this, as it's an extension I'm really hoping to see deployed on Wikisource and Wikibooks. – GorillaWarfare (talk) 02:24, 16 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Certainly sounds very interesting QU TalkQu 16:05, 16 April 2013 (UTC)