[Sugar-devel] Book bundles and Read

[Sayamindu Dasgupta]

On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 10:58 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?


I agree with Gary that a well formed directory structure in a USB key
is a nice solution to begin with (though we need to think of better
ways to manage collections). However, it would become necessary, at a
certain stage to make the Journal aware of metadata files, either as
DC XML files, or OPDS catalogs. This is because, the various ebook
formats that we currently have differing levels of support for
embedding metadata - for example, at one end of the spectrum we have
CBZ (Comic Book Archive), which has zero support (AFAIK), and on the
other end, we have Epub, which support embedding an entire chunk of
Dublin Core metadata elements. For a simple schema like Title/Author,
we can use a directory structure, but for example, to support all the
15 elements specified in the simple Dublin Core specs, we would need a
quite convoluted directory layout.

Thanks,
Sayamindu



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