[IAEP] IAEP Digest, Vol 14, Issue 58

[Tomeu Vizoso]

On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 11:40, Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
> 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?

Hmm, actually I looked for this book and couldn't find it from inside ETexts:

http://www.gutenberg.cz/kniha.php?etext_nr=357

Any idea why?

Thanks,

Tomeu

> 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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>