[Sugar-devel] Book bundles and Read

[Gary C Martin]

On 22 Jul 2009, at 22:06, Sayamindu Dasgupta wrote:

> Hello,
> While looking at the existing Library Bundle mechanism, I was
> wondering if it would be possible to bypass the Browser altogether and
> launch the catalog inside Read itself (for library bundles that have
> ebooks in them). If we use a zip archive format, with the following
> internal layout, it will be possible to load the catalog directly into
> Read (once I have support for the draft OPDS standard in Read):
>
> .
> |-- books
> |   |-- Verne - 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.epub
> |   |-- Verne - A Journey into the Interior of the Earth.epub
> |   |-- Verne - Around the World in Eighty Days.epub
> |   |-- Verne - From the Earth to the Moon.epub
> |   `-- Verne - The Mysterious Island.epub
> `-- catalog.atom
>
>
> Only the catalog name needs to be constant (catalog.atom) - the books
> would be referenced from the catalog, along with optional thumbnail
> icons etc.
>
> This may be useful in scenarios where the deployment or a distributor
> wants to distribute multiple (but of a similar theme) books together
> (eg: beginning of the school session, books for a specific subject).
>
> Does this make sense ?

Hmmm. The down side of this is that you end up with 1 Journal zip  
bundle holding a large number of books... So, I resume this zip  
bundle, pick one of the many books and start reading. I assume the  
single Journal entry is now remembering this one book and page I'm now  
reading. So now I want to read another book in the same bundle, do I  
loose the reference to the book and the page I was on before? Jump  
through some new UI hoops to flag the book and bookmark the page? It  
feels like walking into a Library, but only being able to read one  
book at a time. Successful Journal entries are the ones that store  
Activity state for some small slice of the goal, one book, not the  
whole library of congress.

I'd be quite happy with zipped bundles that expanded into objects in  
the Journal, well tagged, nicely titled, and with thumbnails. That's  
where the big win is in my mind for distributing content. The xol was  
a reasonable idea, but narrow thinking, it missed the whole point of  
Sugar being centred around a core "Journal" where entries can make use  
of all the search, tagging, and preview features it offers for free.

If the Journal managed to pick up a thumb/grid view in the 0.86 cycle,  
courtesy of Aleksey, then that view plus tagging (author, genre, et  
al) will make Journal your searchable book shelf, when you need it to  
be, and Read (or any other Activity) can focus on presenting great  
content well :-)

Regards,
--Gary