[IAEP] IAEP Digest, Vol 14, Issue 58

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 17:10, James Simmons <jim.simmons at walgreens.com> wrote:
> 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.

Just tried in a recent Soas and it worked wonderfully. Congratulations!

I would like to make it more widely used, but most of the content I
found was in english. Do we know other book sources with more content
in (for example) spanish?

Thanks,

Tomeu

> 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.
>>
>
>
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