[IAEP] The Children's Library On OLPC project

[Jim Simmons]

Sam,

Aleksey Lim's Library Activity supports organizing books that are
stored in the Journal.  It is supposed to eventually work on .82 but
for now only works on .84.  I tried it and it does what Calibre does
and more.  If you need an organized Journal you can use Library, and
the Journal function proper can be left alone.

A Journal entry consists of a file plus metadata.  There is no real
advantage in NOT storing the book in the Journal.  You can convert
whatever book format you're reading into a zipped archive of same on
reading it for the first time then mark the Journal entry with Read's
activity id.  This would give the Journal entry Read's icon and make
it resumable by Read.  I do something like this with Read Etexts when
it reads a plain text file.  I'm not trying to save disk space in this
case; I need to add a pickle file to the archive to store annotations,
so I create a new Zip file and store the text and the pickle in it.

The XO does not have enough disk space to hold hundreds of books as
PDFs.  Plain text files would work, but kids like pictures and I don't
blame them.  As I see it, the child should choose what books go on his
computer for himself, and delete books when he has lost interest in
them.

James Simmons


On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 6:55 PM, Samuel Klein<meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I imagine a final use case in which children do have hundreds of books on
> their XO, not two or three; they are stored compressed, and uncompressed for
> reading; and the Journal stores the record of reading a book, but not the
> uncompressed book itself.
>
> When a stick or local library with thousands or tens of thousands of books
> is available, it could be searched; a collection of books to be copied to
> your XO identified and named; and this collection added to your XO (with the
> name you just gave your collection added as a tag).
>
> If the Journal could implement Calibre-style views, I don't see why it
> couldn't function as a library organizer.
>
> SJ