<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> <title></title> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> Martin, I hear what you are saying. It sounds like what you want is like iTunes is, but for books. The thing is, it would have to do much more than iTunes does. iTunes has its own catalog of music for purchase. If I search for something on iTunes it doesn't have to go all over the Internet looking for stuff. It doesn't have to check out Usenet newsgroups, torrent sites, etc. It just has to look in its own database. iTunes is for finding music easily and paying for it, not for searching the Internet for free music. Now consider how you might go about looking for free books. You'd want to check out Project Gutenberg. You'd want to look at Project Gutenberg of Australia, which has a ton of stuff by dead authors that is legal there but still under copyright in the U.S. You'd want to check out the Baen Free Library of science fiction, which is under copyright but free to download anyway. You'd want to look at free textbooks from various places. You'd want to check the Internet Archive, and probably many other places too. You don't want iTunes. You want Google for books. This makes me believe that what we really want is some kind of server based portal that finds books. That would be quite a project. Probably more than we'd want to attempt. You could get *most* of the benefit of such a portal by simply putting links to Internet Archive, Gutenberg, and other places on the static start page we ship with the Browse activity. To avoid cluttering up that page we might just have a link on the top reading "Free Books". Click on that and another static page comes up which has a ton of links to free book sites, and possibly forms to search on those sites. Maybe some info on the different book formats and what Activities are needed to read them. The other thing that would be nice to have is a sort of "Bind Books" Activity. The idea is a teacher could look for texts for her class, then use the "Bind Books" Activity to package them up as Unified Bundles. She would distribute these bundles to her class, perhaps by putting them on a local web server. I think the Unified Bundles idea is really important, because if we had that reading a book would be as simple as clicking on its entry in the Journal, and getting it in the Journal would be as easy as installing an Activity. You wouldn't have to know or care that the book is a plain text file, or a PDF, or a Djvu file, or a Zip file containing images, or a Zip file containing a plain text file, or a collection of HTML and images that can be browsed offline. The person binding the book would know that; the student would not. Older students could bind their own books and share them. If you did this maybe Activities for reading would cease to exist. Reading books would just be something that Sugar knew how to do. James Simmons Martin Dengler wrote: <blockquote cite="mid:20090428222335.GX29268@ops-13.xades.com" type="cite"> <pre wrap="">James, Thanks for your reply... On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 05:07:15PM -0500, James Simmons wrote: </pre> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap="">[I]f you want to download books from Gutenberg to the XO check out Read Etexts and see what you think. </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap=""> Thanks - will do. And please know I'm just muttering from the peanut gallery - I'll put my code where my mouth is sometime, hopefully, but I can't now, sorry. So please feel free to ignore me. The scenario I was imagining was: Teacher: Can I get my class to read Shakespeare in Sugar? Imaginary SL person: Sure, just click on "Read ETexts" and then the "Find Books" tag. Type "Shakespeare", and go from there [at which point project gutenberg, journal items with a special tag, and other sources are queried filtered by "Shakespeare" to show what books are available for reading]. </pre> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap="">James Simmons </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap=""> Martin </pre> </blockquote> </body> </html>