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Dear Wikimedia
Dear Wikimedia,
As Charlie Collins and I are finalizing GWT in Practice, something occurred to me. As authors after a certain number of years, the copyright on our book will revert to us. It seems to me WikiBooks.org should have an "escrow" option. We submit our book to WikiBooks with a release date, that matches the date our copyright reverts to us. At that point, you can make the content freely available to the world.
Granted, our book, and I suspect a lot of books will be out of date by that point, but I can imagine they would still be useful. I know my now ancient copy of Danny Goodman's JavaScript Bible stills sees regular use. Moreover, an escrow in this form would help to clear up the lingering questions of copyright ownership for out of print books in general. For things that are mostly time-sensitive, a bing able to grant a preset license under the GFDL would be great.
Just a thought,
Robert Cooper
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Wikibooks
I got a link to your blog post in my inbox, and this is the kind of thing that I specialize in so I figured I would drop you a line. Wikibooks does except book donations, although we don't currently have any sort of escrow option. What we could probably do, if you want your book released for free in a quick manner, would be to convert the book to wikitext now, and upload it as soon as the copyright expires. Of course, that depends on how long it will be before copyright expires.
One thing that has happened in the past, but has since not received any attention, is to use Wikibooks to host an Errata section for your book. As errors, changes, etc are made in your manuscript, you can load them for free at Wikibooks. That way, when you do release the book on our site, you can easily merge in the previous text with the changes.
Anyway, I figured it would probably be a long time before your book is released under a free license, so this is all just wishful thinking. I'll contact the MediaWiki developers and see if there could be something along these lines (pages that don't go live until a specific time), but I would be surprised if it happened.