[Sugar-devel] Localized ebook facilities

[James Simmons]

Simon,

You should be able to find ebooks in German using either Read Etexts
or Get Internet Archive Books.  One just does Project Gutenberg plain
text files and the other does PDFs and DJVUs from the Internet
Archive.  The trick is, how do you search for German books only?
Unfortunately, that isn't so easy.

As an Activity developer I'm limited by what both websites provide in
the way of information about their titles.  PG provides a text file
that lists all their titles (or most of them, as it isn't maintained
any longer).  That text file does not list the language of the book
anywhere.

Internet Archive provides something called Advanced Search which I use
for GIAB.  Now that can search for language, but the language for the
book is free form text and not consistently entered in.  I didn't feel
comfortable using that as part of the search criteria, although I do
list it in the search results.

I believe that both sites are interested in getting non-English books
in their collections and also in making those books easier to find.
Sayamindu Dasgupta is working on a variant of GIAB (Get Books) that
may someday be able to search many different book collections using a
standardized search.  It would be fair to say that while the search is
just about ready, the book collections are not.

Probably the best thing to do is to work with the websites in
question.  These sites have more books in English because most of the
volunteers are English speakers.

PG does have a page that lets you list out titles for different
languages.  Once you know what is available you could use Read Etexts
to find them and download them.

James Simmons


> Date: Tue, 02 Mar 2010 11:31:23 +0100
> From: Simon Schampijer <simon at schampijer.de>
> Subject: [Sugar-devel] Localized ebook facilities
> To: James Simmons <jim.simmons at walgreens.com>
> Cc: Sugar-dev <Sugar-devel at lists.sugarlabs.org>
> Message-ID: <4B8CE8FB.5040105 at schampijer.de>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> Hi,
>
> I would like to ease the use of ebooks in the German Sugar version.
>
> Which tools should I use "Get Internet Archive Books" [1] or ReadEtexts
> [2]?. Does it do searches based on the current locale and provide me
> with a list of German books [3]? Or, maybe even better, a filter to
> search only for books of a specific locale?
>
> Thanks in advance,
>    Simon
>
> [1] http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4194
> [2] http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4035
> [3] http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/DE_Kinderbuch_%28B%C3%BCcherregal%29