[IAEP] R: [SoaS] E-Books for Sugar on a Stick (Blueberry)

[Jim Simmons]

Tomeu,

Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive already will host any book
that is in the public domain.  (I think they'll take Creative Commons
stuff too).  Most of the books are in English because that's the
native language of most of the volunteers, but that could change if it
needed to.  I remember a factoid from a few years ago that by
such-and-such a date the most web pages would be in Chinese.  I don't
know if that ever happened, but if a few people in non-English
speaking countries decided to scan in all their public domain books
and proofread the results that could change things very quickly.

The Internet Archive has the complete works of Jules Verne translated
to Yiddish.  They also have a bunch of books in Arabic that seem to be
popular downloads.  PG has books in Esperanto.  They really will take
anything in the public domain.

Sugar already has readers for the most popular free ebook formats.  We
have several apps to search for ebooks, with Sayamindu's
OPDS-supporting Get Books on the way.  With any luck that will create
a demand for more free ebooks and the rest will follow.

James Simmons


> Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:14:16 +0100
> From: Tomeu Vizoso <tomeu at sugarlabs.org>
> Subject: Re: [IAEP] R: [SoaS] E-Books for Sugar on a Stick (Blueberry)
> To: Sean DALY <sdaly.be at gmail.com>
> Cc: Sugar-Labs Mailing lists <soas at lists.sugarlabs.org>,        iaep
>        <iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org>, Yama Ploskonka <yamaplos at gmail.com>,        Carlo
>        Falciola <cfalciola at yahoo.it>
> Message-ID:
>        <242851610911181014q1012314u88723bc85fb22b0e at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> Can we make Sugar a good platform for publishing e-books? Anybody has
> already thought of what it would take?
>
> Regards,
>
> Tomeu