[Sugar-devel] Using web services to browse Internet Archive

[James Simmons]

The latest Read Etexts has a feature that lets you browse an offline 
catalog of books from Project Gutenberg and download the books you find 
to your journal.  It's an impressive feature, but it isn't as useful as 
it might be because Read Etexts only works with plain text.  So while 
there is a good selection of books for young readers, the books are not 
illustrated.

If I was looking for illustrated books for young readers I'd look at the 
Internet Archive website.  IA creates ebooks by scanning page images and 
creating PDF and DJVU files out of them.  They have more books than PG 
does, and many of them are illustrated.  Now what they don't have is a 
handy offline catalog like PG has, but through the Open Library project 
(http://openlibrary.org) they do provide a RESTful API to access the 
contents of their database.  So it looks like you could make an Activity 
that uses this API to search the Open Library and download what you find 
as Journal entries that can be resumed by Read.

When I was looking into this I came across this email thread from 2007:

http://markmail.org/message/n2lag4kxm3sp22jl

In it Don Hopkins describes an Activity to do pretty much what I've 
described above. He mentions an API for the Internet Archive that 
returns an RSS feed or
something like that. I'm wondering if this ever got written and if 
anyone remembers what happened to it.

James Simmons