[Sugar-devel] Book bundles and Read

[Jim Simmons]

Yesterday I had an email exchange with Scotty Auble of the Rural
Design Collective project who have a list of 2,000 some odd books they
want to distribute to Sugar users without requiring them to have
Internet access.  The thought I had was Zip archives with a catalog
file, perhaps in Dublin Core format, and a new Activity that would
look inside these archives, generate a browsable catalog from the
catalog file, and allow the child to select the books he likes and
create Journal entries for them.  I copied this email to the IAEP list
but not here.

I agree with the points Gary is making below and wonder if we need a
different kind of bundle that can be used to distribute collections of
books without requiring the child to install the whole collection.

James Simmons

> Date: Thu, 23 Jul 2009 04:33:09 +0100
> From: Gary C Martin <gary at garycmartin.com>
> Subject: Re: [Sugar-devel] Book bundles and Read
> To: Sayamindu Dasgupta <sayamindu at gmail.com>
> Cc: Sugar devel <sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org>,      OLPC Bookreader
>        list <bookreader at lists.laptop.org>
> Message-ID: <37E66200-FA85-4D24-AA3E-9E2A3A520EDF at garycmartin.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed; delsp=yes
>
>
> 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
>