[IAEP] Project Gutenberg, etc.

[Edward Cherlin]

On Fri, May 1, 2009 at 8:12 AM, James Simmons <jim.simmons at walgreens.com> wrote:
> 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.

It only took me a few minutes on Ubuntu, but then I had almost all of
the Python dependencies previously installed to support other
packages. For me the time consuming part was tagging more than a
thousand files. But it's worth it, because now I don't have to
remember where in the filesystem I put something. Presumably we can
create a library of pretagged documents for our students.

> 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.

I have bookshelves all over the house, as do many of my friends.

> 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.
>>
>
>
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Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name
And Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination.
http://earthtreasury.org/worknet (Edward Mokurai Cherlin)