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. <div class="gmail_quote">2009/5/18 James Simmons <<a href="mailto:jim.simmons@walgreens.com">jim.simmons@walgreens.com</a>> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Carol and Caroline, I'm working on something that should communicate just how useful Sugar is for reading ebooks, but you'll need to be patient. I'm about 90% complete on this, which in IT parlance means I have enough to do a rigged demo but the bulk of the work remains to be done. What I am doing is a new feature for Read Etexts which lets the user browse the offline catalog for Project Gutenberg, select a book from it, download it, and read it. This accomplishes several really useful things: 1). You can download and save multiple books to the Journal in one session by using the "keep" button. So for instance if you want to read "A Thousand Nights and a Night" as translated by Sir Richard Burton you could get all of the volumes in one go. 2). The Journal title will be a meaningful name taken from the catalog. Thus your download of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol" will have a Journal entry with that title, instead of "11.zip", which is the filename in the Gutenberg archive. 3). Since Read Etexts is actually creating the Journal entry the entry will use the Read Etexts icon and can be opened from the Journal with one click. No more opening your book with Etoys by mistake. 4). The biggest thing, though, is you can enter in words in the title or the author's name and see a list of books that have all of those words in them. This really communicates that there are over twenty eight thousand books available in the Gutenberg catalog. For instance, a child entering the word "Shakespeare" will find books about Shakespeare and all of Shakespeare's plays in several languages. (He will not find Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles or Plutarch's Lives in the list, but if he reads all the other books and plays he'll eventually realize he needs to read those too). To see a screenshot from the rigged demo go to this URL and click on the thumbnail: <a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Read_Etexts#Planned_Features" target="_blank">http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Read_Etexts#Planned_Features</a> It's going to take awhile to get the feature fully functional and user friendly, but I have enough working that I know I can get the rest finished in a few weeks. I think this will communicate the variety of ebooks available very well and should be a worthy addition to SoaS. As for some of the other ideas that were expressed, the Sword Bible reader and the Koran reader and the Newbery book bundle might give the impression that to read a book on Sugar you need to package it up somehow. You need to communicate that there are thousands of books ready to go, as is, and these don't do that. (I have nothing against the content of these books, of course). Unfortunately, Project Gutenberg may be the only ebook site with an offline catalog. It would be nice to give the core Read Activity a catalog search like this, but there are no comparable catalogs of PDFs. Maybe Sayamindu's fbreader could use something like this for EPUB files from Gutenberg. James Simmons <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Date: Tue, 12 May 2009 11:42:33 -0700 From: Carol Farlow Lerche <<a href="mailto:cafl@msbit.com" target="_blank">cafl@msbit.com</a>> Subject: Re: [IAEP] The eBook "ah ha" moment for Sugar on a Stick To: Caroline Meeks <<a href="mailto:caroline@solutiongrove.com" target="_blank">caroline@solutiongrove.com</a>> Cc: iaep <<a href="mailto:iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org" target="_blank">iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org</a>> Message-ID: <<a href="mailto:c856d2f0905121142u5a625ba2he65f1544f37b7e23@mail.gmail.com" target="_blank">c856d2f0905121142u5a625ba2he65f1544f37b7e23@mail.gmail.com</a>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" This issue was discussed at length about a week ago, and James Simmons and Alexei (I think) were discussing the provision of a library activity. Until that happens, I think James' reader activity and Sayamendu's fbreader activity should be packaged for SOAS to allow epub, comic format and text formats to be read conveniently in SOAS. <a href="http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/search?q=newbery&cat=all" target="_blank">http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/search?q=newbery&cat=all</a> is a package on aslo of all the free Newbery honor books by women authors as a .xol package. The texts themselves are epub format. I wish someone would reinstate the ability to access .xol files in SOAS. </blockquote> </blockquote></div>