[sugar] eBook ideas

[Don Hopkins]

Samuel Klein wrote:
> A delayed response: I do think there should be a separate 'library' 
> activity, and whether it is part of the browser or not, that is the right 
> place to access "browse books" and "browse audio materials" and "browser 
> [X] to download".
>
> Perhaps on the XO, this activity is tied intimately with the object store,
> and is an interface to it.  This kind of activity/interface should also be 
> available to people not using an XO who browse to a library portal... that
> version should run in a browser.
>
> SJ
>   

That sounds like a good idea: factoring out the Internet Archive library 
browser (and other library browsers) into a separate library activity, 
instead of building it into the eBook reading activity.

The Internet Archive has an HTML and a ReST search interface, and the 
results can come back as RSS feeds.
I think it would be nice to provide an easy to use Sugar user interface 
for browsing and searching the library, instead of raw html in a 
browser. Can we easily plug the penguin tv RSS feed reader or another 
RSS reader component into the library activity?

I'd like to avoid a 1:1 mapping between mime types and activities, the 
way current web browsers work (or fail to work).
That way leads to nothing but madness and mime type hijacking.
When downloading a supported mime type, the user should have some way to 
choose which activity it's sent to, and easily setting the default.

What can you tell me about the summer of code project "soc-eds": 
External eBook data sources via Summer of Code?

    -Don


> On Mon, 2 Apr 2007, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:
>
>   
>> On Fri, 2007-03-30 at 21:24 -0700, Don Hopkins wrote:
>>     
>>> I'm going to be adding some Internet Archive library browsing, searching
>>> and ebook downloading functionality, using RSS feeds.
>>> Since search results are returned as RSS: Do you think I should I try to
>>> use penguintv to browse RSS feeds of book search results? Run it as a
>>> separate activity that switches back to the ebook reader when you click
>>> on a link to a pdf file? Or would it be easier (and better integrated)
>>> to embed the rss reader in the ebook interface? Is there a way to
>>> register the ebook reader activity as the handler of the pdf content
>>> type, so both the web browser and rss reader will switch to it to read
>>> PDF files?
>>>       
>> [ Adding Eben and sj, since I'd like to have their opinion ]
>>
>> I think the best place to integrate access to the Archive library is
>> probably the OLPC library. Right now it's just the home page of the web
>> browser activity but later it might become a separate activity.
>>
>> Clicking on a pdf there would be opened by the default pdf handler,
>> which will normally be the Read activity. (Right now mime handling is
>> hardcoded in sugar but later we will have a way for activities to
>> register themself as handlers for certain object types).
>>
>> Can search/browsing be implemented inside the web browser? That would
>> probably be the easier approach...
>>
>> Marco
>>
>>     
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