[Sugar-devel] Book bundles and Read

[Jim Simmons]

Gary,

If it wasn't clear (because I started this discussion with Scotty
elsewhere) my idea was to put the ebooks, cover images, and Dublin
core catalog in a Zip file, then make an Activity that could read that
Zip file, generate a GUI catalog as a sortable table with images, etc,
in it, then let the kid select a book from that virtual shelf and make
a copy of it to his Journal with all the metadata copied as well.
What Get Internet Archive Books does for the website, this Activity
does for these Zip files.  The Journal is not asked to do anything.

The zip file would be named "conduct of life".  You would have a bunch
of zip files for different topics.  These files would be distributed
on USB sticks.

Everything I have described could be made to work in .82.

James Simmons


On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 4:09 PM, Gary C Martin<gary at garycmartin.com> wrote:
> 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
>
>