[IAEP] IAEP Digest, Vol 13, Issue 86

[James Simmons]

Martin,

Read doesn't support plain text files, but a separate Activity I wrote, 
called Read Etexts, does.  You can download one of the Zip formats from 
the Gutenberg site to the Journal with Browse, then Resume it with Read 
Etexts.  Read Etexts also has a text to speech with highlighting feature 
that you might like.

Read can process Djvu files when an Evince plugin for that purpose is 
installed.  This should be a standard part of the Sugar installation in 
the future and I think it's in SoaS now.  Djvu is a format used by the 
Internet Archive that reproduces scanned pages in a highly compressed 
way, giving the ebook the appearance of the original book pages.  It 
seems to work better than PDFs for this purpose.  Between Gutenberg and 
IA you have thousands of books available.

On the Sugar-devel list there was a discussion of Unified Bundles, where 
various kinds of readable media can be bundled up like Activities are 
bundled.  One of the goals of this would be to improve the experience of 
reading texts, slide shows, and the like under Sugar.  Instead of 
needing to know what reading Activity goes with what format, the child 
would just launch the bundle and the appropriate code would display the 
content to him.  Configuration in a file in the bundle would say what 
kind of file it was.  The bundle maker would set that up, and the child 
wouldn't have to deal with it.

If you were going to create an application to get books from all of the 
different possible sources and package them up as bundles that sounds to 
me like a web application on a server, not an Activity.

In any case, if you want to download books from Gutenberg to the XO 
check out Read Etexts and see what you think.

James Simmons

> The portion that I'll paraphrase as "content is king" (or "create the
> content and the hardware orders will come", for a longer version) made
> me re-think the ebook-concept-as-trojan-horse argument that's been
> made before: its big advantage is that it short-circuits the "lack of
> content" problem by definition: it seems popular discourse takes for
> granted that e-book readers are separate to e-books but not that
> educational laptops are separate from educational content.
>
> A killer app might be an "App Store" for books, with the ability to
> access multiple "stores".  Project Gutenberg could be a store, for
> example.  Even just Project Gutenberg support in Read would be cool
> (Apologies if this is already available and I don't know about it -
> please correct me).  Calibre's been talked about but the feature is
> "on the TODO list"[1] (though I didn't see it[2]).
>
> http://www.mobileread.com/ appears to be a place to start reading
> about e-book reader software and platforms, but I don't have any more
> time to do the necessary research to see what the solved problems are
> (and how they're applicable to Sugar), unfortunately.
>
> Martin