Hi, On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 1:25 PM, Sean DALY <[email protected]> wrote: > http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,53825,00.html > > This report is being widely reported in the tech and mainstream press, e.g.: > > http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jSEAAZS_Y9QD8xiVACWhSDFzHXQQ > http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idCNN0853892120091008?rpc=44 > > There's an improved Kindle offer, Barnes & Noble (a major US > bookseller) will offer an Android-powered reader, and rumors are thick > about an Apple unit in early 2010. > > I'm tempted to put a spotlight on Sugar's e-reader capabilities for > the Blueberry launch planned for late November. To do so, I need to > understand better the format issues, which I'm a little confused > about. Is ePub best, or something else? >
The major advantage of Epub over others is that it is "reflowable". Traditionally, PDF and other formats have had the problem that when you zoom in to increase the font size/better adapt to your reader, you would often have to scroll horizontally as well. Epub is being adapted at a rapid pace by major players - Google (http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2009/08/download-over-million-public-domain.html), Internet Archive (not officially announced yet), Sony (http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/3834431/), Project Gutenberg (http://www.pg-news.org/20090320/epub-books-now-available-at-project-gutenberg/), O'Reilly (http://oreilly.com/ebooks/epub/), etc. Moreover, there are sites dedicated to producing very high quality Epub files, like feedbooks.com and http://www.epubbooks.com/ Right now, I'm quite happy with the level of support Read offers for Epubs from various sources, though it can be improved a lot. More help is needed in testing how Read renders Epubs from various sources and in various devices (I have primarily limited my testing to XO-1(.5) and sugar-jhbuild). As far as annotations go, we only support bookmarks and notes associated with the bookmarks (this is applicable to _all_ fileformats), but I'm currently working on epub specific annotation features such as highlighting portions of the text and associating notes with highlighted portions, etc. http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2009/09/28/23918/ offers some interesting viewpoints on what is needed from a electronic book reader. Epub, of course is only one part of the equation. Another yet equally important part of the puzzle is book acquisition (both from the Internet and from the local school server). James Simmons's Get Internet Archive Books activity handles that part. Now that the 0.86 release rush is over, I'm extending that activity to support the upcoming OPDS standard, which will probably become the standard way for ebook distributors to publish their catalog online. This means that apart from the Internet Archive, the activity will be able to query and download other vendors like feedbooks, etc as well. At some point, my plan is to implement a OPDS server system/local cache system for the school server so that we can address bandwidth starved use cases. Let me know if you need any more information. (I really need to do a proper blog post about all this.. :-( Thanks, Sayamindu -- Sayamindu Dasgupta [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings] _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
