[IAEP] Project Gutenberg, etc.

[Carol Farlow Lerche]

I wonder if you use an ebook reader?  An ebook reader, similarly to a music
player, needs a good way to organize and find content ON THE MACHINE to
read.  You aren't usually using it to read from the net -- quite the
contrary.   Now for a long time I used the browser to search for my books
(which were all html -- I'm a sf fan, and have a lot of Baen Books content,
both free and purchased).   This worked for me because I knew how to
transfer the content to my XO and manually unpack it in a place that was
consistent and create simple index files.  But it was very ad hoc and
wouldn't work for the average user.  Then I discovered calibre, thanks to a
posting on one of these sugar related lists.  I switched away from sugar to
using Ubuntu for reading.

Calibre has multiple parts.  One part is an application that imports and
catalogs your reading matter.  I don't say "books", because it is more
eclectic than that, encompassing rss feeds, pdf files, etc.   The catalog
interface has the expected meta-information one would expect:  title,
author, publisher, subject tags, series, date of acquision.  It displays
this information in a tabular format and will sort the rows by any of the
column headings.  This is a great way to access a large collection of
reading material.  If sugar's journal had an alternate display for materials
flagged in a certain way, it could supplant this function, but rather than
wait for perfection in the journal, I think it would be better to make this
part of calibre, which is written in Python, run under sugar.

Calibre also has an ebook reader, so when you select an item in the catalog
you can open the book to read.  I think this component isn't quite as good
as fbreader, which has the ability to rotate the text 90 degrees.

Calibre understands multiple formats and can convert among them.  One thing
it lacks is the ability to import from a URL.  (These conversion tools are
also available as command line tools).   One of the formats it supports is
epub, which is an open format for packaging a "book" -- meaning text,
illustrations and metadata into a single file.  This is a great way to
package reading material, and is what you are finding on more and more free
content sites.


On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 9:41 AM, James Simmons <jim.simmons at walgreens.com>wrote:

>  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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