[Sugar-devel] Book bundles and Read

[Gary C Martin]

On 23 Jul 2009, at 21:36, Jim Simmons wrote:

> Gary,
>
> What Scotty wants is a listing that can be easily browsed, and which
> shows image files for book covers.

Yes, book cover images, is the big missing feature with current  
Journal abilities when accessing external media (along with a Journal  
thumb view, but hopefully that feature is coming).

> The problem I have with USB
> devices on the Journal is that they are listed in descending order by
> the date and time they were created.  Even a few hundred books on a
> USB stick isn't all that easy to manage.  (I have an SD drive with 2
> GB worth of comic books and it really bugs me that they aren't in
> alphabetical order).  Searching is fine if you know what you're
> looking for.  In this case the kid might be asked by his teacher to
> pick out a book from the "conduct of life" collection and do a report
> on it.

The teacher asking students "to pick out a book from the 'conduct of  
life'" is the easy case :-) The kid just types 'conduct of life' into  
the Journal search filed, and just those books are listed. All that  
the USB stick would have needed is for those books to be in a  
directory called "conduct of life", or for that text to be part of  
each books file name title. Like any real bricks and mortar library,  
putting the books in some sort of order, up front, really helps the  
punters in finding what they are looking for ;-)

> In that case the kid really needs to be able to search the USB
> drive as if it was a real bookshelf, look at the book covers, read
> descriptions, etc.  What I had proposed would allow that.

Yes, Journal type meta-data is not supported on external media  
unfortunately (though that is a really tough problem to solve). I  
guess you can make the argument for creating custom file layouts /  
index that you implement in Journal (Ewwww), so that you can stick  
book thumbs and metadata in known names/folders... But this is just a  
re-implementation of the data-store format from Tomeu, so no need to  
re-invent or re-implement, just use the existing format for free!

What this would mean for the Journal is allowing external volumes/ 
media to be flagged in some way so that the Journal would read and  
display their data just like from the local Sugar data-store. I guess  
this could be very low hanging fruit, you'd need to ask Tomeu... The  
flag could be something as simple as an empty root level file on the  
volume named to indicate the volume is in data-store format and should  
be treated as such.

> The idea is to provide books to kids that don't have access to the
> Internet, either because it isn't available or because of parental
> concern.

+1

Regards,
--Gary