[Sugar-devel] Pathagar, Library Activity, etc.

[James Simmons]

I think most of you know I wrote a FLOSS Manual called "Make Your Own
Sugar Activities!"  What you may not know is that I've been working on
a second FLOSS Manual which is about e-books and Sugar (current title
"E-Book Enlightenment: Reading And Leading With One Laptop Per
Child").  This book covers everything about free e-books: where to
find them, how to make them, how to get them published, how to publish
them yourself, how to convert bound and printed books into e-books,
what Activities are available to work with e-books, etc.  I even have
a chapter on how to build your own book scanner.

So far the book seems to be coming along OK.  I designed and built a
book scanner, and I've donated a bunch of books from my personal
library as e-books for both the Internet Archive and Project
Gutenberg.  You can see the ones I donated to IA by searching for the
word "nicestep".  For Project Gutenberg you'll have to be patient.  It
takes a LONG time to get a book into Project Gutenberg.  Two that
*might* come out soon are "Benchley Beside Himself" by Robert C.
Benchley and "The Big Sleep" by Raymond Chandler, both at PG Canada.
Several other books are in the bowels of the Distributed Proofreaders
pipeline.  (I didn't do any kid's books because I don't own any).

The thing is, I really want to have a good story about Sugar and
e-books.  Part of that story was going to be the Pathagar Book Server,
which seems to be an abandoned project, plus the Library Activity,
which I thought was a great idea that could really set Sugar apart
from other e-book reading platforms.  That was supposed to really come
to life in version 2.  Whatever happened to version 2?

After working on this book for many months I've come to the conclusion
that the combination of Sugar and free e-books has ENORMOUS potential.
 While I believe in Constructivism as much as anyone, the e-book idea
is MUCH easier to sell.  There's a lot of good work going on in this
area, (not just by Sugar but also by the Internet Archive, Project
Gutenberg, Distributed Proofreading, and DIYBookScanning)  but there's
also things like Pathagar and Booki that aren't quite there yet.
Right now I describe Pathagar as a work in progress, but I haven't see
progress for quite some time, and Library seemed dead before I even
began the book.

I'd like to wrap up this book soon and prepare it for Lulu.  I never
did write anything about Library, but I did do a chapter on Pathagar
and I wonder if I should remove it.

If you want to look at the book, you'll find it here:

http://en.flossmanuals.net/ReadingandSugar/Introduction

James Simmons