Wikibooks:Reading room/Assistance

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Welcome to the Assistance reading room where Wikibookians help each other solve problems encountered while contributing to books or otherwise taking part in the Wikibooks community.

Copyright rules about adding a book that will later be commercialized

Hello

Thank you for your work. My names is Tomas, a math instructor, and I just want to make sure I understand the copyright rules for wikibooks. My partners and I are writing an ODEs (ordinary diffential equations) math textbook aimed for commercial use.

However, I feel bad that there is no ODEs wikibook, so I started adding content to: Ordinary Differential Equations

Do you think it is possible to keep adding content and later on publish our textbook? The plan is to add a lot of the foundational material in the wikibook and the more exotic stuff in the textbook.

According to Wikibooks:Requesting copyright permission

"The main legal issue that is important to explain to potential contributors: they would be agreeing that their material can be used freely by Wikibooks AND its downstream users, and that such use might include commercial use, for which the contributor is not entitled to royalties or compensation. "

we are allowed to use wikibook content for commercial use as long as we make a reference of the Wikibook authors.

Is that correct or did we miss something? Thank you and have a great day, Tomas — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tkojar (talk • contribs) 01:54, 26 September 2018 (UTC)

Please let me know, if I should post this elsewhere. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 02:00, 26 September 2018 (talk • contribs) Tkojar (UTC)

@Tkojar: This is a perfectly good place to ask... --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 05:21, 26 September 2018 (UTC)

You are correct. There are many books that have been published this way. For example, this one QuiteUnusual (discuss • contribs) 10:45, 26 September 2018 (UTC)

Thank you. Can you give me examples of textbooks that started as wikibooks and got published by major companies such as Pearson or Springer? So I am guessing there are no or few wikibooks that got published by such companies, but maybe they accepted rewrites and enhanced versions. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tkojar (talk • contribs)

I don't have any such examples, although they may exist. I think it is likely a question of degree - I see many books that incorporate material from Commons or Wikipedia (e.g., a diagram or paragraph of text) with a citation using "by Wikipedia authors" (which is not sufficient). You have to question whether a major company would publish a book where all the content was already freely available under a copyleft license. QuiteUnusual (discuss • contribs) 14:45, 26 September 2018 (UTC)