[Sugar-devel] Book bundles and Read

[Gary C Martin]

Hi James,

On 23 Jul 2009, at 16:52, Jim Simmons wrote:

> 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.

Just wondering. If I had a USB stick with 2,000 pdf, plain text,  
etext, djvu, epub etc files on it... if they are at least reasonably  
well titled file names (lets say at least title, author), then a child  
can:

1). pop in the USB stick
2). goto the Journal and select the external USB stick icon
3). search and/or browse the books by author / title
4). any entry they want can be dragged to their Journal icon
5). ...or clicking any object entry will both start it for reading and  
copy it into the childs Journal

FWIW some find step 5 a limitation or design bug for Sugar, in that  
you can't work with files on external media that are larger than the  
free space you have left in your Journal. Step 4 could be better, as  
the icon for your Journal (appears in a bottom tray when additional  
media devices are present), is actually an XO kid icon, would be more  
logical to show the Journal icon I think. Step 3 clearly could be  
prettier but would require some way of generating live previews for  
the entries currently in view (and then you could use the proposed  
Journal grid view to view book covers).

It's also worth noting that although directory structure of the  
external media is not displayed directly (Journal shows a flattened  
list of all files), the full directory path to the file is placed in  
its description field. This is all fully searchable data, so you could  
put all the Lewis Carroll books in a folder of that name, and that  
would be enough to allow you to query Journal for them.

So just some well chosen directory names (by author seems sensible),  
and consistently well named files (i.e full title of book) would make  
quite an accessible solution. Perhaps if there's interest, we can  
polish some of the above steps to make it even smoother in 0.86?

Regards,
--Gary

>> 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