On further thought, it seems to me that there should be two activities. The first is a reader. At minimum it should read plain text, PDF and EPUB files. The Read activity fulfils this requirement. An additional feature would be text-to-speech, with word highlighting (as Read ETexts has). In this way, you can run TTS on any source file.
The second is a fetcher. It allows searching through different pre-defined repositories, and the selected book can be downloaded to the journal. The Get Books activity fulfils this requirement. Files opened from the journal open up in the reader. An additional feature would be to add additional source repositories (similar to how Software Update works). This will allow deployments to create their own catalogues of books and make them available online. I think it's important to split the reading from the fetching to avoid having an overly complicated activity. The journal is the means by which they connect. What do people think of this idea? Sridhar On 29 May 2011 04:07, Gonzalo Odiard <[email protected]> wrote: > Yes, I was working trying to merge the code in Get Books and Read > activities. > Now, you can read "plain text" files in Read, and Get Books can download > books from > Feedbooks and Internet Archive. > A missing part is download books from Gutenberg project. > > Gonzalo > > On Sat, May 28, 2011 at 12:55 PM, Sridhar Dhanapalan <[email protected]> > wrote: >> >> On 28 May 2011 04:36, James Simmons <[email protected]> wrote: >> > Marilyn, >> > >> > I wrote an Activity called Read Etexts that might be of some use to >> > you. It can take one of the "plain text" files put out by Project >> > Gutenberg and read it aloud, like a Kindle. As it reads the words it >> > highlights the word spoken. The highlighting needs a faster computer >> > than an XO to keep up with the word being spoken, but it doesn't need >> > to be much faster. >> > >> > http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4035 >> > >> > James Simmons >> >> This activity looks like it could have some real potential in our >> deployments. >> >> It seems like there's a lot of functionality crossover between Read >> Etexts, Get Internet Archive Books (your code) and Get Books (based on >> Get Internet Archive Books). Are there any thoughts about a merger? A >> reader that could pull content and vocalise the words from all of the >> sources supported by Get Books (plus external files) would be >> fantastic! >> >> Thanks, >> Sridhar >> _______________________________________________ >> 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
