[IAEP] Project Gutenberg, etc.

[James Simmons]

Carol,

I took a day off yesterday to run errands and I installed Calibre on a 
Fedora 10 box and tried it out.  It has an enormous number of 
dependencies so it took a couple of hours to get it installed and working.

I don't think our experience of books is that much different.  If I had 
bought a dead tree copy of "Edison's Conquest of Mars" I would certainly 
have kept it after I finished it.  I have a huge collection of books and 
am constantly going to used book sales to improve it.  I donate books I 
don't plan to read again, but I end up keeping most of them.  So I don't 
see a gender thing going on there.

If I had bought a copy-protected ebook version of the same book I would 
have backed it up somewhere, because I wouldn't want to risk losing it.  
On the other hand, with Gutenberg I have reasonable faith that anything 
I could download today will still be there tomorrow.

To me ebooks ONLY make sense for public domain works and content not 
easily available in another way.  Like the Burton translation of 1001 
Nights.  If I want to read Neal Stephenson I'll buy the dead tree 
version and somehow make room on my shelves to keep it.

Why I would not keep ebooks on the XO is that it has only 1 gig that is 
really useful, and almost half of that is taken up by the OS.  
Considering all the things a student will use his XO for there really 
isn't room for a big library on there.  Plus I sometimes have to do a 
clean reinstall of Sugar that clears out the Journal, so there's not 
much point in putting stuff there that might not get used.

Now as I said before, I do have a library of comic books in .cbz 
format.  I keep some on an SD card and the rest on a Fedora 10 box where 
I can download them to the XO Journal using the web server on that box.  
So if I wanted to build something that does what Calibre does it would 
make sense to make it a server based application.  There has been talk 
of packing up ebooks like they were Activities.  If you do that, every 
school could have its own copy of a version of activities.sugarlabs.org 
containing ebooks packaged by the teachers and the older students.  
Having that kind of website, with few changes, would let kids look up 
books, rate them, see which books are the most popular, the newest, 
etc.  You could put it on the School Server.

As for the XO itself, right now the Journal always lists entries in 
order of most recently used.  If you added the ability to sort by the 
title string instead, plus gave it a filter that showed entries NOT 
created by any Activity I think you'd have 80% of the value of Calibre 
right there.  Add an optional meta tag for "Author" and allow sorting by 
it and you'd bring the total to 90%.

I also didn't care for the book reader supplied with Calibre.  To use it 
for Gutenberg plain text files you need to convert then to Sony ebook 
format, and I wasn't all that pleased with the results.  I wrote Read 
Etexts so I could read the books without converting them.

James Simmons


Carol Farlow Lerche wrote:
> 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. 
>