[IAEP] Project Gutenberg, etc.

[James Simmons]

Martin,

I hear what you are saying.  It sounds like what you want is like iTunes 
is, but for books.  The thing is, it would have to do much more than 
iTunes does.  iTunes has its own catalog of music for purchase.  If I 
search for something on iTunes it doesn't have to go all over the 
Internet looking for stuff.  It doesn't have to check out Usenet 
newsgroups, torrent sites, etc.  It just has to look in its own 
database.  iTunes is for finding music easily and paying for it, not for 
searching the Internet for free music.

Now consider how you might go about looking for free books.  You'd want 
to check out Project Gutenberg.  You'd want to look at Project Gutenberg 
of Australia, which has a ton of stuff by dead authors that is legal 
there but still under copyright in the U.S.  You'd want to check out the 
Baen Free Library of science fiction, which is under copyright but free 
to download anyway.  You'd want to look at free textbooks from various 
places.  You'd want to check the Internet Archive, and probably many 
other places too.  You don't want iTunes.  You want Google for books.

This makes me believe that what we really want is some kind of server 
based portal that finds books.  That would be quite a project.  Probably 
more than we'd want to attempt.

You could get *most* of the benefit of such a portal by simply putting 
links to Internet Archive, Gutenberg, and other places on the static 
start page we ship with the Browse activity.  To avoid cluttering up 
that page we might just have a link on the top reading "Free Books".  
Click on that and another static page comes up which has a ton of links 
to free book sites, and possibly forms to search on those sites.  Maybe 
some info on the different book formats and what Activities are needed 
to read them.

The other thing that would be nice to have is a sort of "Bind Books" 
Activity.  The idea is a teacher could look for texts for her class, 
then use the "Bind Books" Activity to package them up as Unified 
Bundles.  She would distribute these bundles to her class, perhaps by 
putting them on a local web server.  I think the Unified Bundles idea is 
really important, because if we had that reading a book would be as 
simple as clicking on its entry in the Journal, and getting it in the 
Journal would be as easy as installing an Activity.  You wouldn't have 
to know or care that the book is a plain text file, or a PDF, or a Djvu 
file, or a Zip file containing images, or a Zip file containing a plain 
text file, or a collection of HTML and images that can be browsed 
offline.  The person binding the book would know that; the student would 
not.

Older students could bind their own books and share them.

If you did this maybe Activities for reading would cease to exist.  
Reading books would just be something that Sugar knew how to do.

James Simmons

Martin Dengler wrote:
> James,
>
> Thanks for your reply...
>
> On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 05:07:15PM -0500, James Simmons wrote:
>   
>> [I]f you want to download books from Gutenberg to the XO  
>> check out Read Etexts and see what you think.
>>     
>
> Thanks - will do.  And please know I'm just muttering from the peanut
> gallery - I'll put my code where my mouth is sometime, hopefully, but
> I can't now, sorry.  So please feel free to ignore me.
>
> The scenario I was imagining was:
>
> Teacher: Can I get my class to read Shakespeare in Sugar?
>
> Imaginary SL person: Sure, just click on "Read ETexts" and then the
> "Find Books" tag.  Type "Shakespeare", and go from there [at which
> point project gutenberg, journal items with a special tag, and other
> sources are queried filtered by "Shakespeare" to show what books are
> available for reading].
>
>   
>> James Simmons
>>     
>
> Martin
>
>   

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