[IAEP] Get Internet Archive Books Activity available soon

[Jim Simmons]

I uploaded the first version of Get Internet Archive Books to ASLO
about an hour ago, so perhaps by the time you read this it will be
available to try out there.  I'm sending this email to IAEP because
I'd like some feedback from those who might use the Activity.  What
this Activity does is to provide a front end to the Advanced Search
function of the Internet Archive website.  In essence it gives you a
nice GUI to search through the archive, get information about books,
then download the books you choose to the Journal.  It's very similar
to the offline catalog feature of Read Etexts, but better, because it
has much more information on the books.  The screenshots at ASLO tell
the story so I won't give more details here.  Suffice it to say if you
are looking for books with pictures, or books in languages other than
English, then this Activity will be of interest.  If you've ever
dreamed of reading the works of Jules Verne in Yiddish then this
Activity will make those dreams come true.

Currently the Activity can only download the DJVU format.  This format
is an alternative to PDF for documents consisting of scanned in book
pages.  It gives better results than PDF in less than half the disk
space.  You can use Read to view these files.  Unfortunately, Read's
support for DJVU is flaky, at least in .82 on the XO,  I'm pretty sure
I'm downloading the books correctly, but it's possible I'm to blame
for this.  I'll need to do some more testing to know for sure.  Future
versions will support downloading PDFs and other formats offered by
this website.

I'm hoping that some of you will give it a look and make whatever
suggestions you can.  If you don't like the icon I'm using feel free
to make suggestions there as well.

James Simmons