On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 17:10, James Simmons <[email protected]> wrote: > Carol, > > Over the long weekend I finished version 11 of Read Etexts and posted it > to http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4035. I hope you > and everyone else will give it a try.
Just tried in a recent Soas and it worked wonderfully. Congratulations! I would like to make it more widely used, but most of the content I found was in english. Do we know other book sources with more content in (for example) spanish? Thanks, Tomeu > As for whether it will be of any use for those with unreliable net > access, I believe it will be. First, a teacher or student can browse > the catalog with no net access at all, because the catalog is included > in the bundle. Second, the books are downloaded very quickly. A > teacher could spend an hour or so in a net cafe and download hundreds of > books, which she could share with her class on the Mesh network either > one book at a time using the Read Etexts sharing feature or all at once > using Aleksey Lim's forthcoming Library activity. While using my new > gas grill this weekend I downloaded all 16 volumes of Burton's > translation of the _Thousand Nights and a Night_, all 4 volumes of an > English translation of the _Mahabharata_, plus 3 Jules Verne novels. > The food being grilled did not suffer while I was doing this. > > You really need to try the catalog search to appreciate just how > impressive it is to be able to quickly search a list of 24,000 some odd > books in many languages. You want _Holinshed's Chronicles_? They have > it. Jules Verne in the original French? It's there. Juvenile books? > Tons of them. > > The catalog search makes it dramatically faster to find and download > books from Gutenberg. The Journal entry is automatically given a decent > title, something you won't get from the website, and the Journaled books > can be resumed with one click. I've even solved the problem that saved > page numbers don't survive a reboot. (This problem is fixed in SoaS but > is still present in the latest release candidate for the XO, so we can > assume that the problem will exist on most XO's for quite some time). I > solve it by putting the saved page number in the Journal title. > > This release is a giant step forward for Read Etexts. For the first > time it's really usable. > > And addressing your other point, I have no objection to packaged > materials of any kind. I just think that we need to communicate that > packaged materials are not the ONLY way to get content on the machine > and read it, and that in fact there is a large amount of content that > Sugar can use as is. > > James Simmons > > > > Carol Farlow Lerche wrote: >> 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. >> > > > _______________________________________________ > IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) > [email protected] > http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep > _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
