[IAEP] Project Gutenberg, etc.

[James Simmons]

Carol,

I think we agree on more things than we disagree on.  As a software 
developer by trade I tend to think in terms of "what's the least you 
could do that could get the job done?"  Software projects tend to get 
more and more complex as they go on, and if you don't start with 
something simple your project will go off the rails at some point.  The 
lackluster support in Sugar for reading ebooks has been a gripe of mine 
ever since I got my G1G1 XO and discovered it could only read PDFs and 
that it wouldn't save the page number you stopped reading at in a way 
that would survive a reboot.  I tried to improve things by writing Read 
Etexts and View Slides and that just made me *really* frustrated with Sugar.

The XO has a terrific feature in that it can fold up to be an ebook 
reader.  If only the software for reading ebooks was as good!

I don't own an iPhone, but I admire the "There's an App for that" 
commercials.  They do a good job of selling the product.  But suppose 
you bought an iPhone and found out that if you wanted to make a phone 
call that "There's an App for that."  Actually, four different Apps, and 
you had to choose the App that handled dialing to phones belonging to 
the phone company your recipient used.  And there was a Phone Directory 
App which would let you dial out using whichever App you liked from any 
number, but refused to remember which phone number belonged to which 
phone company.  You had to be sure to pick the right one each time.  
Also, the Phone Directory only listed entries in the order you entered 
them in and could not sort them any other way.

On the other hand, it would be *really* good at playing games.

That's where I think we're at with Sugar today.  There have been some 
improvements.  In SoaS metadata like page number last read is saved 
across reboots, and you can choose what Activity to open your Journal 
entry with from the main Journal listing, rather than having to open the 
Journal details page to do it.  The Read activity can read DjVu files in 
addition to PDFs.  But there's lots of room for improvement.  And one 
thing I'd like to see is that reading ebooks would be a function of 
Sugar itself, and there would be no Read Activities.

I wonder how the OLPC project might have changed if it was sold as an 
ebook reader that could also run educational software.  It brings to 
mind an old Woody Allen joke, where he claimed to own a sword that 
turned into a cane so the muggers would feel sorry for him.

James Simmons