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 <[email protected]> > 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 <[email protected]> >> Subject: Re: [IAEP] The eBook "ah ha" moment for Sugar on a Stick >> To: Caroline Meeks <[email protected]> >> Cc: iaep <[email protected]> >> Message-ID: >> <[email protected]> >> 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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