[IAEP] IAEP Digest, Vol 14, Issue 58

[Carol Farlow Lerche]

James, I think it is wonderful to make it easy for people with good network
access to fetch books from the net.  But I don't think that precludes the
need for packages with selected materials.  Kids in poor areas don't
necessarily have net access all the time.

2009/5/18 James Simmons <jim.simmons at walgreens.com>

> Carol and Caroline,
>
> I'm working on something that should communicate just how useful Sugar is
> for reading ebooks, but you'll need to be patient.  I'm about 90% complete
> on this, which in IT parlance means I have enough to do a rigged demo but
> the bulk of the work remains to be done.  What I am doing is a new feature
> for Read Etexts which lets the user browse the offline catalog for Project
> Gutenberg, select a book from it, download it, and read it.  This
> accomplishes several really useful things:
>
> 1).  You can download and save multiple books to the Journal in one session
> by using the "keep" button.  So for instance if you want to read "A Thousand
> Nights and a Night" as translated by Sir Richard Burton you could get all of
> the volumes in one go.
>
> 2).  The Journal title will be a meaningful name taken from the catalog.
>  Thus your download of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol"
> will have a Journal entry with that title, instead of "11.zip", which is the
> filename in the Gutenberg archive.
>
> 3). Since Read Etexts is actually creating the Journal entry the entry will
> use the Read Etexts icon and can be opened from the Journal with one click.
>  No more opening your book with Etoys by mistake.
>
> 4).  The biggest thing, though, is you can enter in words in the title or
> the author's name and see a list of books that have all of those words in
> them.  This really communicates that there are over twenty eight thousand
> books available in the Gutenberg catalog.  For instance, a child entering
> the word "Shakespeare" will find books about Shakespeare and all of
> Shakespeare's plays in several languages.  (He will not find Raphael
> Holinshed's Chronicles or Plutarch's Lives in the list, but if he reads all
> the other books and plays he'll eventually realize he needs to read those
> too).
>
> To see a screenshot from the rigged demo go to this URL and click on the
> thumbnail:
>
> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Read_Etexts#Planned_Features
>
> It's going to take awhile to get the feature fully functional and user
> friendly, but I have enough working that I know I can get the rest finished
> in a few weeks.
>
> I think this will communicate the variety of ebooks available very well and
> should be a worthy addition to SoaS.
>
> As for some of the other ideas that were expressed, the Sword Bible reader
> and the Koran reader and the Newbery  book bundle might give the impression
> that to read a book on Sugar you need to package it up somehow.  You need to
> communicate that there are thousands of books ready to go, as is, and these
> don't do that.  (I have nothing against the content of these books, of
> course).
>
> Unfortunately, Project Gutenberg may be the only ebook site with an offline
> catalog.  It would be nice to give the core Read Activity a catalog search
> like this, but there are no comparable catalogs of PDFs.  Maybe Sayamindu's
> fbreader could use something like this for EPUB files from Gutenberg.
>
> James Simmons
>
>  Date: Tue, 12 May 2009 11:42:33 -0700
>> From: Carol Farlow Lerche <cafl at msbit.com>
>> Subject: Re: [IAEP] The eBook "ah ha" moment for Sugar on a Stick
>> To: Caroline Meeks <caroline at solutiongrove.com>
>> Cc: iaep <iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org>
>> Message-ID:
>>        <c856d2f0905121142u5a625ba2he65f1544f37b7e23 at mail.gmail.com>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>>
>> This issue was discussed at length about a week ago, and James Simmons and
>> Alexei (I think) were discussing the provision of a library activity.
>>  Until
>> that happens, I think James' reader activity and Sayamendu's fbreader
>> activity should be packaged for SOAS to allow epub, comic format and text
>> formats to be read conveniently in SOAS.
>>
>> http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/search?q=newbery&cat=all
>>
>> is a package on aslo of all the free Newbery honor books by women authors
>> as
>> a .xol package.  The texts themselves are epub format. I wish someone
>> would
>> reinstate the ability to access .xol files in SOAS.
>>
>
>
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