[4] It was launched to host and build free textbooks on subjects such as organic chemistry and physics, in response to a request by Wikipedia contributor Karl Wick.

The project consists of both a magazine and a website, and is currently being developed in English, Danish, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Arabic and Bangla.

[citation needed] While some books are original, others began as text copied over from other sources of free content textbooks found on the Internet.

This means that, as with its sister project, Wikipedia, contributions remain copyrighted to their creators, while the licensing ensures that it can be freely distributed and reused subject to certain conditions.

[3] The top ten Wikibooks language projects by mainspace article count:[3] For a complete list with totals, see Wikimedia Statistics.