[Sugar-devel] Book bundles and Read

[Sayamindu Dasgupta]

On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 9:03 AM, Gary C Martin<gary at garycmartin.com> wrote:

<..snip snip>

>
> 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 think Read can be able to handle that. It means some extra work in
the code, but it can be possible to extend the metadata in such a way
that the state for each and every book in the bundle/collection is
remembered.

> 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 :-)
>

The book shelf (the catalog view) inside Read needs to be implemented
in any case for things like remote catalogs (school server, various
on-line distributors, etc). I am a bit unsatisfied with the current
.xol based solution, and was wondering if we could leverage the
catalog view in Read to handle collections directly. I think it is
very important to make sharing of collections easily - and if the
Journal is able to do that after expanding the bundle into different
objects, I think it will be the most optimal way.

Thanks,
Sayamindu




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