[IAEP] Get Internet Archive Books Activity available soon

[Sayamindu Dasgupta]

On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 2:31 AM, Jim Simmons<nicestep at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>

http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/Read-56.xo will give much better
performance in 8.2.x OLPC OS releases.

On a related note - you will probably be interested to know that the
Internet Archive has started work on experimental OPDS support:
http://bookserver.archive.org/ (unfortunately they only link to the
PDF variants from that catalogue)

Cheers,
Sayamindu


-- 
Sayamindu Dasgupta
[http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]