[Sugar-devel] [ANNOUNCE] Get Books Activity 3, now with SneakerNet/ChappalNet support

[Jim Simmons]

Sayamindu,

Regarding the "friendly fork" of Get Internet Archive Books, I'm
thinking that perhaps you will soon have Get Books in good enough
shape that the original Activity will no longer be needed, and at that
point you should merge your clone with the mainline and take over the
Activity.  About the only thing that GIAB can do that you can't (yet)
is give the user a choice of download formats.  It shouldn't be too
tough to implement that option if you restrict it to the Internet
Archive.

I could rename the original Activity in ASLO and rename its wiki page,
then give you authority in git to update the mainline.  You would need
to renumber your Activity version to number 4, as GIAB is currently at
version 3.

It's pretty clear that GIAB is a dead end and what you're doing is the
future.  You've even addressed the future needs of the Rural Design
Collective for distributing children's books on a thumb drive, which
was something I had hoped to do with GIAB at some point.

Let me know what you think.

James Simmons


> Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2009 04:26:07 +0530
> From: Sayamindu Dasgupta <sayamindu at gmail.com>
> Subject: [Sugar-devel] [ANNOUNCE] Get Books Activity 3, now with
>        SneakerNet/ChappalNet   support
> To: OLPC Bookreader list <bookreader at lists.laptop.org>,         Sugar devel
>        <sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org>
> Message-ID:
>        <a1314bfe0911051456k2e7791a8h989e41265d127b17 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> Hello,
> Get Books Activity is a friendly fork of Jim Simmon's Get Internet
> Archive Books activity and it allows Sugar users to search for and
> download Ebooks from various sources. One of the major points of
> concern for many was this activity required Internet access, and I
> have tried to address that issue with this release.
>
> The activity can now access catalogs in removable devices (pen drives,
> etc) and lets the user search through these catalogs. A removable
> device with a catalog will show up in the list of sources from which
> the books can be downloaded/copied. Utilizing this feature, one will
> be able to copy thousands of ebooks in a pen-drive, put a catalog file
> (catalog.xml) in the root[1] directory of the device, and send it to
> bandwidth starved areas. (think of a library on a stick ;-)
>
> Apart from the above features, this release also has some subtle
> changes in the behavior which will hopefully make the overall use
> experience better. (for example, changing the source in the middle of
> a search will trigger a new search within the new selected source)
>
> I do not consider this release to be stable, so I have not uploaded it
> to ASLO yet (I had to do a lot more refactoring that I would have
> liked to get the removable device support working). To download the
> activity (it should work with Sucrose 0.82 upwards), follow the link:
> http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/GetBooks-3.xo
>
> To test the removable device support, in a USB drive, unzip
> http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/books_on_a_stick.zip [2] (make sure
> that the catalog.xml file stays in the toplevel directory of the
> drive), and plug the USB drive in wherever you are running Sugar. Get
> Books is _supposed_ to detect removable devices as and when they are
> plugged in/removed, but if your device does not show up, try
> restarting the activity before trying anything else.
>
> Thanks,
> Sayamindu