[IAEP] Project Gutenberg, etc.

[James Simmons]

Carol,

I don't have an ebook reader, other than my XO.  I do have an ipod.  Now 
where the purpose of the ipod is to store your entire music collection 
in your pocket, and maybe an ebook reader could do the same thing for 
all your books, up until now I hadn't thought of the XO like that.  
Since the books are free and always available (unlike books on a Kindle, 
which you have to pay for and can't trade in at a used book store or 
loan to anyone) there isn't much incentive to keep the book on the 
machine once you're done reading it.   You can always download it 
again.  When I first wrote Read Etexts I downloaded the complete Burton 
translation of _1001 Nights_, plus the complete English translation of 
_The Mahabharata_.  I fully intended to keep them on the machine at all 
times, but I didn't.  I only had a few hundred meg storage, so something 
had to go.  After I finished reading "Edison's Conquest of Mars" by 
Garrett P. Serviss I blew that away too.

On the other hand I do have a large collection of comic books for 
reading with View Slides on my SD card, which has two gig to play with.  
Comics take much more room than plain text files, so the SD card is the 
only place I can keep them.  The SD card cannot do everything the 
Journal can do, including saving meta data like last page number read, 
so I end up copying the comic from the SD card to the Journal to read 
it, then deleting it from the Journal afterwards.

In any case I've never used my XO like you describe, because I never had 
enough content on it to need to do that.  The normal Journal view has 
been adequate for me.

I'm going to check out Calibre when I can.  If I were (hypothetically) 
to make something like Calibre for the XO it would probably be an 
Activity that showed you an alternate view of the Journal, except it 
would only show entries that have a MIME type that might be a book, and 
it would store meta info for the books, as well as the content type of 
the book (which the MIME type by itself would not be enough to do).  
Maybe this Activity would also include the code for Read Etexts, View 
Slides, etc. as well so you would manage and read your collection with 
the same Activity.  The metadata could be pickled Python objects stored  
in the  Journal.

Now that I look at Aleksey's description of the Library activity it 
sounds pretty similar to this.

The thing is the target audience for the XO and Sugar in general may 
find something like Calibre to be overkill.

James Simmons


Carol Farlow Lerche wrote:
> 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.