[Sugar-devel] Book bundles and Read

[Samuel Klein]

Missing here is a way to handily install/uninstall a named set of works from
your journal/XO.

If you could search through the 2000 books on a usb stick, find 40 results,
copy those into your Journal as a named collection, and later choose to read
individual books (without making na addition on-disk copy) or uninstall that
collection (without individually uninstalling all 40 books), that would be a
good user experience.

The journal entry for reading a book from a collection could be a metadata
entry with all the informatino about the book, but could point to the
existing collection (at appropriate index even) for the work itself.

The catalog file with the data about all 40 books should be searchable
through the journal as well for every bundle, which would allow you to pull
up the collection when searching for one of its elements.  then you'd need
an additional info-rich detailed view for a collection within the journal
(which is needed anyway -- bundles are much more complex than a single text
file or image).

SJ

On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 1:28 PM, Gary C Martin <gary at garycmartin.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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