Well, you are describing our solution :) <div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 3:15 AM, Sridhar Dhanapalan <<a href="mailto:sridhar@laptop.org.au">sridhar@laptop.org.au</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">On further thought, it seems to me that there should be two activities. The first is a reader. At minimum it should read plain text, PDF and EPUB files. The Read activity fulfils this requirement. An additional feature would be text-to-speech, with word highlighting (as Read ETexts has). In this way, you can run TTS on any source file. </blockquote><div> Read can open PDF, EPUB, DejaVu and text files. Can do text to speech with word highlighting of text files, and only text to speech of EPUB files right now. The idea is add the capability to the other formats. </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"> The second is a fetcher. It allows searching through different pre-defined repositories, and the selected book can be downloaded to the journal. The Get Books activity fulfils this requirement. Files opened from the journal open up in the reader. An additional feature would be to add additional source repositories (similar to how Software Update works). This will allow deployments to create their own catalogues of books and make them available online. </blockquote><div> This is the description of GetBooks. A deployment can use Pathagar to create a book repository. In eduJam, we talked about how improve the tagging of books to create catalogs, and we need to do a few changes in the server code. Nicholas and Daniel worked in code to add dynamic catalogs to GetBooks, and we are trying to improve it. GetBooks and Pathagar use the OPDS protocol. Gonzalo </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"> I think it's important to split the reading from the fetching to avoid having an overly complicated activity. The journal is the means by which they connect. What do people think of this idea? Sridhar <div><div></div><div class="h5"> On 29 May 2011 04:07, Gonzalo Odiard <<a href="mailto:gonzalo@laptop.org">gonzalo@laptop.org</a>> wrote: > Yes, I was working trying to merge the code in Get Books and Read > activities. > Now, you can read "plain text" files in Read, and Get Books can download > books from > Feedbooks and Internet Archive. > A missing part is download books from Gutenberg project. > > Gonzalo > > On Sat, May 28, 2011 at 12:55 PM, Sridhar Dhanapalan <<a href="mailto:sridhar@laptop.org.au">sridhar@laptop.org.au</a>> > wrote: >> >> On 28 May 2011 04:36, James Simmons <<a href="mailto:nicestep@gmail.com">nicestep@gmail.com</a>> wrote: >> > Marilyn, >> > >> > I wrote an Activity called Read Etexts that might be of some use to >> > you. It can take one of the "plain text" files put out by Project >> > Gutenberg and read it aloud, like a Kindle. As it reads the words it >> > highlights the word spoken. The highlighting needs a faster computer >> > than an XO to keep up with the word being spoken, but it doesn't need >> > to be much faster. >> > >> > <a href="http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4035" target="_blank">http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4035</a> >> > >> > James Simmons >> >> This activity looks like it could have some real potential in our >> deployments. >> >> It seems like there's a lot of functionality crossover between Read >> Etexts, Get Internet Archive Books (your code) and Get Books (based on >> Get Internet Archive Books). Are there any thoughts about a merger? A >> reader that could pull content and vocalise the words from all of the >> sources supported by Get Books (plus external files) would be >> fantastic! >> >> Thanks, >> Sridhar >> _______________________________________________ >> IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) >> <a href="mailto:IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org">IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org</a> >> <a href="http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep" target="_blank">http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep</a> > > </div></div></blockquote></div>