[IAEP] Project Gutenberg, etc.

[Carol Farlow Lerche]

I guess we all view the needs of our target audience through the prism of
our own experience at their age.  I was an avid reader, and a re-reader of
favorite books.  (Still am, as are many of my women friends -- perhaps this
is gender related).  So the idea of dumping a book I enjoyed would be
anathema to me, especially if my access to the net was not reliable and
pervasive.   Do try calibre, as it really doesn't seem like overkill to me,
except for the format conversion features perhaps.

On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 2:10 PM, James Simmons <jim.simmons at walgreens.com>wrote:

> 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.
>>
>
>
>
>


-- 
"I don't consider him a particularly reliable source of information."

-- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, at a House Foreign Affairs Committee
meeting, on former Vice President Dick Cheney.
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