[IAEP] Project Gutenberg, etc.

[Carol Farlow Lerche]

James, Thanks for taking the time to at least examine this.

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.
>

Yes, it was troublesome to install on Ubuntu as well, but seemingly this was
because of the Python version.


> 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.
>

Since my ebooks largely come from somewhere other than PG, I am not so
sanguine.  I also buy a few.


> 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.


De gustibus non est disputandum.  However, for the XO using kids in the
deployments, I doubt they have access to many paper books of their own or
from a library.

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.


First, textual items are not large.  My 123 books take 43 MB.  Second, kids
won't be reinstalling sugar or wiping their journal or we have a problem
bigger than losing their ebooks.  Finally, what are the electronic "other
things" that are more precious to a child than books?

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.


I just don't agree that personal collections of reading material should rely
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 don't disagree that this COULD be done.  But so far, hardly anything that
is asserted as a great change to functionality of the journal HAS been
done.  This is what I call making the perfect the enemy of the good.

I also didn't care for the book reader supplied with Calibre.


This is why we need to get Sayamindu's fbreader activity brought into aslo.
Right now it is only available on the XO.  The Calibre book reader looks to
be a separable component.


>  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.
>

epub format is available experimentally directly from Project Gutenberg.
Works great for me!  I have Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown mysteries,
Autocrat of the Breakfast Table and the Baroness Orczy Pimpernel series that
way.


Carol Lerche
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