[Sugar-devel] Book bundles and Read

[Jim Simmons]

All,

In my own emails when I refer to "content bundles" I am not referring
to anything that Sugar Labs has proposed as a standard.  I was just
thinking about how to deal with the Children's Book Library project,
how would I deal with the problem of distributing 2,000 books to
children without access to the Internet or even a local web server,
knowing the limitations of the Journal Activity as it exists in .82.
I came up with the idea of:

1). PDF books stored in zip files along with gif files representing
their book covers plus a catalog file.

2). An Activity, possibly an enhancement to Get Internet Archive Books
that would browse this catalog file and create a user interface
allowing the books to be browsed and copied to the Journal one at a
time.

I suggested that the catalog file be in Dublin Core format because
that seems to be trendy but truthfully I'd be happy with a catalog of
delimited lines like this:

The Innocents Abroad|Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)|Travel, Humor|innocents

where "innocents.pdf" is the name of the PDF and "innocents.gif" is
the cover page image.

I've been a professional programmer for over thirty years so my method
tends to be:

1).  What do we have?

2).  What do we want to do with it?

3).  What is the simplest (not necessarily the most generally useful)
way to get there?

I certainly can understand the value of a good standard approach to
this kind of problem but I wasn't trying to propose one.

James Simmons