[IAEP] IAEP Digest, Vol 14, Issue 58

[James Simmons]

Carol,

Over the long weekend I finished version 11 of Read Etexts and posted it 
to http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4035.  I hope you 
and everyone else will give it a try.

As for whether it will be of any use for those with unreliable net 
access, I believe it will be.  First, a teacher or student can browse 
the catalog with no net access at all, because the catalog is included 
in the bundle.  Second, the books are downloaded very quickly.  A 
teacher could spend an hour or so in a net cafe and download hundreds of 
books, which she could share with her class on the Mesh network either 
one book at a time using the Read Etexts sharing feature or all at once 
using Aleksey Lim's forthcoming Library activity.  While using my new 
gas grill this weekend I downloaded all 16 volumes of Burton's 
translation of the _Thousand Nights and a Night_, all 4 volumes of an 
English translation of the _Mahabharata_, plus 3 Jules Verne novels.  
The food being grilled did not suffer while I was doing this.

You really need to try the catalog search to appreciate just how 
impressive it is to be able to quickly search a list of 24,000 some odd 
books in many languages.  You want _Holinshed's Chronicles_?  They have 
it.  Jules Verne in the original French?  It's there.  Juvenile books?  
Tons of them.

The catalog search makes it dramatically faster to find and download 
books from Gutenberg.  The Journal entry is automatically given a decent 
title, something you won't get from the website, and the Journaled books 
can be resumed with one click.  I've even solved the problem that saved 
page numbers don't survive a reboot.  (This problem is fixed in SoaS but 
is still present in the latest release candidate for the XO, so we can 
assume that the problem will exist on most XO's for quite some time).  I 
solve it by putting the saved page number in the Journal title.

This release is a giant step forward for Read Etexts.  For the first 
time it's really usable.

And addressing your other point, I have no objection to packaged 
materials of any kind.  I just think that we need to communicate that 
packaged materials are not the ONLY way to get content on the machine 
and read it, and that in fact there is a large amount of content that 
Sugar can use as is.

James Simmons



Carol Farlow Lerche wrote:
> James, I think it is wonderful to make it easy for people with good 
> network access to fetch books from the net.  But I don't think that 
> precludes the need for packages with selected materials.  Kids in poor 
> areas don't necessarily have net access all the time.
>