[Sugar-devel] Interactive Ebooks [Re: Deployment feedback braindump]

[Sayamindu Dasgupta]

Hi,

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 4:52 PM, Albert Cahalan<acahalan at gmail.com> wrote:
> S Page writes:
>> On Sun, Aug 9, 2009 at 10:41 AM, Daniel Drake<dsd at laptop.org> wrote:
>
>>> adding an interactivity component that would be impossible
>>> to have when working with paper-based exercise books.
>>
>> And impossible with PDFs.
>
> No way. PDFs can be interactive in many ways.
>
> First of all, a PDF is pretty much just well-behaved postscript.
> You can embed that in more postscript. The user can thus scribble
> all over the document.
>

In this context, I have been playing around with Read + Epub - and I
have posted a short, unstructured dump of my thoughts at
http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings/2009/08/12/braindump-on-ebooks/

Some screencasts:

** http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/interactive_books_video/video.ogv
- shows that a video clip can be embedded in a book readable by Read

** http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/interactive_books_video/python.ogv
- shows that a python shell can be embedded in a book readable by Read

** http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/interactive_books_video/digital_logic.ogv
- shows that a etoys simulation can be embedded in a book readable by Read

I have also started to experiment with ebooks as exercise books -
HTML5 local storage looks promising, and with some magic at the school
server end, we might be able to get something done. I'll resume my
experiments during the weekends, and will post updates when I have
some progress.
Of course - none of this is _standard_ epub, and I'll try to figure
out where I can get information about planned updates to the Epub
spec, and if this type of use-case can be accommodated into the next
version.

Thanks,
Sayamindu

-- 
Sayamindu Dasgupta
[http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings]