[IAEP] IAEP Digest, Vol 14, Issue 58

[Kathy Pusztavari]

James,

I'm curious.  Can't it be as simple as putting books on memory or a
thumbdrive and having a program find the books locally and let you pick from
that list?  Like MS Reader searching for .lit books or Peanut Reader
(whatever it is called today) searching for .pdb files and creating a
library list for you?

-Kathy 

-----Original Message-----
From: iaep-bounces at lists.sugarlabs.org
[mailto:iaep-bounces at lists.sugarlabs.org] On Behalf Of James Simmons
Sent: Monday, May 18, 2009 8:52 AM
To: Carol Farlow Lerche; Caroline Meeks
Cc: iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org
Subject: Re: [IAEP] IAEP Digest, Vol 14, Issue 58

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.

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