[IAEP] IAEP Digest, Vol 14, Issue 58

[James Simmons]

Carol and Caroline,

I'm working on something that should communicate just how useful Sugar 
is for reading ebooks, but you'll need to be patient.  I'm about 90% 
complete on this, which in IT parlance means I have enough to do a 
rigged demo but the bulk of the work remains to be done.  What I am 
doing is a new feature for Read Etexts which lets the user browse the 
offline catalog for Project Gutenberg, select a book from it, download 
it, and read it.  This accomplishes several really useful things:

1).  You can download and save multiple books to the Journal in one 
session by using the "keep" button.  So for instance if you want to read 
"A Thousand Nights and a Night" as translated by Sir Richard Burton you 
could get all of the volumes in one go.

2).  The Journal title will be a meaningful name taken from the 
catalog.  Thus your download of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by 
Lewis Carrol" will have a Journal entry with that title, instead of 
"11.zip", which is the filename in the Gutenberg archive.

3). Since Read Etexts is actually creating the Journal entry the entry 
will use the Read Etexts icon and can be opened from the Journal with 
one click.  No more opening your book with Etoys by mistake.

4).  The biggest thing, though, is you can enter in words in the title 
or the author's name and see a list of books that have all of those 
words in them.  This really communicates that there are over twenty 
eight thousand books available in the Gutenberg catalog.  For instance, 
a child entering the word "Shakespeare" will find books about 
Shakespeare and all of Shakespeare's plays in several languages.  (He 
will not find Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles or Plutarch's Lives in the 
list, but if he reads all the other books and plays he'll eventually 
realize he needs to read those too).

To see a screenshot from the rigged demo go to this URL and click on the 
thumbnail:

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Read_Etexts#Planned_Features

It's going to take awhile to get the feature fully functional and user 
friendly, but I have enough working that I know I can get the rest 
finished in a few weeks.

I think this will communicate the variety of ebooks available very well 
and should be a worthy addition to SoaS.

As for some of the other ideas that were expressed, the Sword Bible 
reader and the Koran reader and the Newbery  book bundle might give the 
impression that to read a book on Sugar you need to package it up 
somehow.  You need to communicate that there are thousands of books 
ready to go, as is, and these don't do that.  (I have nothing against 
the content of these books, of course).

Unfortunately, Project Gutenberg may be the only ebook site with an 
offline catalog.  It would be nice to give the core Read Activity a 
catalog search like this, but there are no comparable catalogs of PDFs.  
Maybe Sayamindu's fbreader could use something like this for EPUB files 
from Gutenberg.

James Simmons

> Date: Tue, 12 May 2009 11:42:33 -0700
> From: Carol Farlow Lerche <cafl at msbit.com>
> Subject: Re: [IAEP] The eBook "ah ha" moment for Sugar on a Stick
> To: Caroline Meeks <caroline at solutiongrove.com>
> Cc: iaep <iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org>
> Message-ID:
> 	<c856d2f0905121142u5a625ba2he65f1544f37b7e23 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> This issue was discussed at length about a week ago, and James Simmons and
> Alexei (I think) were discussing the provision of a library activity.  Until
> that happens, I think James' reader activity and Sayamendu's fbreader
> activity should be packaged for SOAS to allow epub, comic format and text
> formats to be read conveniently in SOAS.
>
> http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/search?q=newbery&cat=all
>
> is a package on aslo of all the free Newbery honor books by women authors as
> a .xol package.  The texts themselves are epub format. I wish someone would
> reinstate the ability to access .xol files in SOAS.