Re: [IAEP] Project Gutenberg, etc.
Edward, I'm a little puzzled by this statement: Presumably we can create a library of pretagged documents for our students. I would guess you're referring to some variation of the Unified Bundles idea, and these bundles would have tags in them. Fine with me, but who is creating this library? Is it Sugar Labs? Do individual schools have local etext libraries? There are already several good repositories of free etexts available, covering many languages. Would we create yet another one? The way I would do it would be similar to the way my public library did it. Your first card only lets you check out books from the kid's section. This would be like a school's local etext library, where the teachers select and bundle texts they consider suitable for the younger readers. (Maybe the older students help with the bundling). In Junior High they put a special stamp on your kid's card that let you into the adult section, but you were only allowed to check out books from certain sections. Then in High School you got a grown up card, which was good for everything except the books in a locked case. This second and third tier I would consider to be Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive, etc. where the kid is hunting for his own books and has to either bundle them himself or use Activities that don't require bundling. James Simmons Edward Cherlin wrote: It only took me a few minutes on Ubuntu, but then I had almost all of the Python dependencies previously installed to support other packages. For me the time consuming part was tagging more than a thousand files. But it's worth it, because now I don't have to remember where in the filesystem I put something. Presumably we can create a library of pretagged documents for our students. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Project Gutenberg, etc.
On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 7:46 AM, James Simmons jim.simm...@walgreens.com wrote: Edward, I'm a little puzzled by this statement: Presumably we can create a library of pretagged documents for our students. I would guess you're referring to some variation of the Unified Bundles idea, and these bundles would have tags in them. Fine with me, but who is creating this library? Is it Sugar Labs? Do individual schools have local etext libraries? You appear to be answering your own question below--teachers and students for sure. I would only add that the children will know better than anyone else what works for them, so the system should gather their inputs. There are already several good repositories of free etexts available, covering many languages. Would we create yet another one? Start with the tags that those repositories provide: author, date, language, subject matter, or anything else. I interviewed once at a company that provided software technology for data warehousing that did not require conversion of existing databases to the same format. We can use that idea to give the appearance of a unified library catalog for any number of source repositories. (I didn't get the contract, because they were in the process of being bought by a larger company, and froze all hiring.) The way I would do it would be similar to the way my public library did it. Your first card only lets you check out books from the kid's section. This would be like a school's local etext library, where the teachers select and bundle texts they consider suitable for the younger readers. And add any tags or other metadata appropriate for their use. Books can be tagged by subject matter or relevance to a course. Students can rate and tag documents, and the system can aggregate the results, as for instance Amazon does. (Maybe the older students help with the bundling). +1 In Junior High they put a special stamp on your kid's card that let you into the adult section, but you were only allowed to check out books from certain sections. Then in High School you got a grown up card, which was good for everything except the books in a locked case. I grew up in much more open systems. Newark NJ, I later found out, had the largest open stack library in the world. Then in college I also had stack privileges starting in my freshman year. I had to register at the Rare Book Library, and didn't get to wander the stacks there, but could request anything in the catalog at any time, except items requiring special handling and environment. Those required an application stating the research purpose and so on. I read original 16th century documents related to a Shakespeare play we were studying. They had an original Gutenberg Bible and an Audubon Elephant Folio on public display. This second and third tier I would consider to be Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive, etc. where the kid is hunting for his own books and has to either bundle them himself or use Activities that don't require bundling. See also Goodreads.com, where people can enter their favorites and what they are currently reading, with ratings, tags, and reviews. James Simmons Edward Cherlin wrote: It only took me a few minutes on Ubuntu, but then I had almost all of the Python dependencies previously installed to support other packages. For me the time consuming part was tagging more than a thousand files. But it's worth it, because now I don't have to remember where in the filesystem I put something. Presumably we can create a library of pretagged documents for our students. -- Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name And Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination. http://earthtreasury.org/worknet (Edward Mokurai Cherlin) ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Project Gutenberg, etc.
On Fri, May 1, 2009 at 8:12 AM, James Simmons jim.simm...@walgreens.com wrote: Carol, I took a day off yesterday to run errands and I installed Calibre on a Fedora 10 box and tried it out. It has an enormous number of dependencies so it took a couple of hours to get it installed and working. It only took me a few minutes on Ubuntu, but then I had almost all of the Python dependencies previously installed to support other packages. For me the time consuming part was tagging more than a thousand files. But it's worth it, because now I don't have to remember where in the filesystem I put something. Presumably we can create a library of pretagged documents for our students. I don't think our experience of books is that much different. If I had bought a dead tree copy of Edison's Conquest of Mars I would certainly have kept it after I finished it. I have a huge collection of books and am constantly going to used book sales to improve it. I donate books I don't plan to read again, but I end up keeping most of them. So I don't see a gender thing going on there. I have bookshelves all over the house, as do many of my friends. If I had bought a copy-protected ebook version of the same book I would have backed it up somewhere, because I wouldn't want to risk losing it. On the other hand, with Gutenberg I have reasonable faith that anything I could download today will still be there tomorrow. To me ebooks ONLY make sense for public domain works and content not easily available in another way. Like the Burton translation of 1001 Nights. If I want to read Neal Stephenson I'll buy the dead tree version and somehow make room on my shelves to keep it. Why I would not keep ebooks on the XO is that it has only 1 gig that is really useful, and almost half of that is taken up by the OS. Considering all the things a student will use his XO for there really isn't room for a big library on there. Plus I sometimes have to do a clean reinstall of Sugar that clears out the Journal, so there's not much point in putting stuff there that might not get used. Now as I said before, I do have a library of comic books in .cbz format. I keep some on an SD card and the rest on a Fedora 10 box where I can download them to the XO Journal using the web server on that box. So if I wanted to build something that does what Calibre does it would make sense to make it a server based application. There has been talk of packing up ebooks like they were Activities. If you do that, every school could have its own copy of a version of activities.sugarlabs.org containing ebooks packaged by the teachers and the older students. Having that kind of website, with few changes, would let kids look up books, rate them, see which books are the most popular, the newest, etc. You could put it on the School Server. As for the XO itself, right now the Journal always lists entries in order of most recently used. If you added the ability to sort by the title string instead, plus gave it a filter that showed entries NOT created by any Activity I think you'd have 80% of the value of Calibre right there. Add an optional meta tag for Author and allow sorting by it and you'd bring the total to 90%. I also didn't care for the book reader supplied with Calibre. To use it for Gutenberg plain text files you need to convert then to Sony ebook format, and I wasn't all that pleased with the results. I wrote Read Etexts so I could read the books without converting them. James Simmons Carol Farlow Lerche wrote: I guess we all view the needs of our target audience through the prism of our own experience at their age. I was an avid reader, and a re-reader of favorite books. (Still am, as are many of my women friends -- perhaps this is gender related). So the idea of dumping a book I enjoyed would be anathema to me, especially if my access to the net was not reliable and pervasive. Do try calibre, as it really doesn't seem like overkill to me, except for the format conversion features perhaps. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep -- Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name And Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination. http://earthtreasury.org/worknet (Edward Mokurai Cherlin) ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Project Gutenberg, etc.
Carol, I took a day off yesterday to run errands and I installed Calibre on a Fedora 10 box and tried it out. It has an enormous number of dependencies so it took a couple of hours to get it installed and working. I don't think our experience of books is that much different. If I had bought a dead tree copy of Edison's Conquest of Mars I would certainly have kept it after I finished it. I have a huge collection of books and am constantly going to used book sales to improve it. I donate books I don't plan to read again, but I end up keeping most of them. So I don't see a gender thing going on there. If I had bought a copy-protected ebook version of the same book I would have backed it up somewhere, because I wouldn't want to risk losing it. On the other hand, with Gutenberg I have reasonable faith that anything I could download today will still be there tomorrow. To me ebooks ONLY make sense for public domain works and content not easily available in another way. Like the Burton translation of 1001 Nights. If I want to read Neal Stephenson I'll buy the dead tree version and somehow make room on my shelves to keep it. Why I would not keep ebooks on the XO is that it has only 1 gig that is really useful, and almost half of that is taken up by the OS. Considering all the things a student will use his XO for there really isn't room for a big library on there. Plus I sometimes have to do a clean reinstall of Sugar that clears out the Journal, so there's not much point in putting stuff there that might not get used. Now as I said before, I do have a library of comic books in .cbz format. I keep some on an SD card and the rest on a Fedora 10 box where I can download them to the XO Journal using the web server on that box. So if I wanted to build something that does what Calibre does it would make sense to make it a server based application. There has been talk of packing up ebooks like they were Activities. If you do that, every school could have its own copy of a version of activities.sugarlabs.org containing ebooks packaged by the teachers and the older students. Having that kind of website, with few changes, would let kids look up books, rate them, see which books are the most popular, the newest, etc. You could put it on the School Server. As for the XO itself, right now the Journal always lists entries in order of most recently used. If you added the ability to sort by the title string instead, plus gave it a filter that showed entries NOT created by any Activity I think you'd have 80% of the value of Calibre right there. Add an optional meta tag for Author and allow sorting by it and you'd bring the total to 90%. I also didn't care for the book reader supplied with Calibre. To use it for Gutenberg plain text files you need to convert then to Sony ebook format, and I wasn't all that pleased with the results. I wrote Read Etexts so I could read the books without converting them. James Simmons Carol Farlow Lerche wrote: I guess we all view the needs of our target audience through the prism of our own experience at their age. I was an avid reader, and a re-reader of favorite books. (Still am, as are many of my women friends -- perhaps this is gender related). So the idea of dumping a book I enjoyed would be anathema to me, especially if my access to the net was not reliable and pervasive. Do try calibre, as it really doesn't seem like overkill to me, except for the format conversion features perhaps. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Project Gutenberg, etc.
James, Thanks for taking the time to at least examine this. I took a day off yesterday to run errands and I installed Calibre on a Fedora 10 box and tried it out. It has an enormous number of dependencies so it took a couple of hours to get it installed and working. Yes, it was troublesome to install on Ubuntu as well, but seemingly this was because of the Python version. wouldn't want to risk losing it. On the other hand, with Gutenberg I have reasonable faith that anything I could download today will still be there tomorrow. Since my ebooks largely come from somewhere other than PG, I am not so sanguine. I also buy a few. To me ebooks ONLY make sense for public domain works and content not easily available in another way. Like the Burton translation of 1001 Nights. If I want to read Neal Stephenson I'll buy the dead tree version and somehow make room on my shelves to keep it. De gustibus non est disputandum. However, for the XO using kids in the deployments, I doubt they have access to many paper books of their own or from a library. Why I would not keep ebooks on the XO is that it has only 1 gig that is really useful, and almost half of that is taken up by the OS. Considering all the things a student will use his XO for there really isn't room for a big library on there. Plus I sometimes have to do a clean reinstall of Sugar that clears out the Journal, so there's not much point in putting stuff there that might not get used. First, textual items are not large. My 123 books take 43 MB. Second, kids won't be reinstalling sugar or wiping their journal or we have a problem bigger than losing their ebooks. Finally, what are the electronic other things that are more precious to a child than books? Now as I said before, I do have a library of comic books in .cbz format. I keep some on an SD card and the rest on a Fedora 10 box where I can download them to the XO Journal using the web server on that box. So if I wanted to build something that does what Calibre does it would make sense to make it a server based application. I just don't agree that personal collections of reading material should rely on the school server. As for the XO itself, right now the Journal always lists entries in order of most recently used. If you added the ability to sort by the title string instead, plus gave it a filter that showed entries NOT created by any Activity I think you'd have 80% of the value of Calibre right there. Add an optional meta tag for Author and allow sorting by it and you'd bring the total to 90%. I don't disagree that this COULD be done. But so far, hardly anything that is asserted as a great change to functionality of the journal HAS been done. This is what I call making the perfect the enemy of the good. I also didn't care for the book reader supplied with Calibre. This is why we need to get Sayamindu's fbreader activity brought into aslo. Right now it is only available on the XO. The Calibre book reader looks to be a separable component. To use it for Gutenberg plain text files you need to convert then to Sony ebook format, and I wasn't all that pleased with the results. I wrote Read Etexts so I could read the books without converting them. epub format is available experimentally directly from Project Gutenberg. Works great for me! I have Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown mysteries, Autocrat of the Breakfast Table and the Baroness Orczy Pimpernel series that way. Carol Lerche ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Project Gutenberg, etc.
Carol, I think we agree on more things than we disagree on. As a software developer by trade I tend to think in terms of what's the least you could do that could get the job done? Software projects tend to get more and more complex as they go on, and if you don't start with something simple your project will go off the rails at some point. The lackluster support in Sugar for reading ebooks has been a gripe of mine ever since I got my G1G1 XO and discovered it could only read PDFs and that it wouldn't save the page number you stopped reading at in a way that would survive a reboot. I tried to improve things by writing Read Etexts and View Slides and that just made me *really* frustrated with Sugar. The XO has a terrific feature in that it can fold up to be an ebook reader. If only the software for reading ebooks was as good! I don't own an iPhone, but I admire the There's an App for that commercials. They do a good job of selling the product. But suppose you bought an iPhone and found out that if you wanted to make a phone call that There's an App for that. Actually, four different Apps, and you had to choose the App that handled dialing to phones belonging to the phone company your recipient used. And there was a Phone Directory App which would let you dial out using whichever App you liked from any number, but refused to remember which phone number belonged to which phone company. You had to be sure to pick the right one each time. Also, the Phone Directory only listed entries in the order you entered them in and could not sort them any other way. On the other hand, it would be *really* good at playing games. That's where I think we're at with Sugar today. There have been some improvements. In SoaS metadata like page number last read is saved across reboots, and you can choose what Activity to open your Journal entry with from the main Journal listing, rather than having to open the Journal details page to do it. The Read activity can read DjVu files in addition to PDFs. But there's lots of room for improvement. And one thing I'd like to see is that reading ebooks would be a function of Sugar itself, and there would be no Read Activities. I wonder how the OLPC project might have changed if it was sold as an ebook reader that could also run educational software. It brings to mind an old Woody Allen joke, where he claimed to own a sword that turned into a cane so the muggers would feel sorry for him. James Simmons ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Project Gutenberg, etc.
Martin, I hear what you are saying. It sounds like what you want is like iTunes is, but for books. The thing is, it would have to do much more than iTunes does. iTunes has its own catalog of music for purchase. If I search for something on iTunes it doesn't have to go all over the Internet looking for stuff. It doesn't have to check out Usenet newsgroups, torrent sites, etc. It just has to look in its own database. iTunes is for finding music easily and paying for it, not for searching the Internet for free music. Now consider how you might go about looking for free books. You'd want to check out Project Gutenberg. You'd want to look at Project Gutenberg of Australia, which has a ton of stuff by dead authors that is legal there but still under copyright in the U.S. You'd want to check out the Baen Free Library of science fiction, which is under copyright but free to download anyway. You'd want to look at free textbooks from various places. You'd want to check the Internet Archive, and probably many other places too. You don't want iTunes. You want Google for books. This makes me believe that what we really want is some kind of server based portal that finds books. That would be quite a project. Probably more than we'd want to attempt. You could get *most* of the benefit of such a portal by simply putting links to Internet Archive, Gutenberg, and other places on the static start page we ship with the Browse activity. To avoid cluttering up that page we might just have a link on the top reading Free Books. Click on that and another static page comes up which has a ton of links to free book sites, and possibly forms to search on those sites. Maybe some info on the different book formats and what Activities are needed to read them. The other thing that would be nice to have is a sort of Bind Books Activity. The idea is a teacher could look for texts for her class, then use the Bind Books Activity to package them up as Unified Bundles. She would distribute these bundles to her class, perhaps by putting them on a local web server. I think the Unified Bundles idea is really important, because if we had that reading a book would be as simple as clicking on its entry in the Journal, and getting it in the Journal would be as easy as installing an Activity. You wouldn't have to know or care that the book is a plain text file, or a PDF, or a Djvu file, or a Zip file containing images, or a Zip file containing a plain text file, or a collection of HTML and images that can be browsed offline. The person binding the book would know that; the student would not. Older students could bind their own books and share them. If you did this maybe Activities for reading would cease to exist. Reading books would just be something that Sugar knew how to do. James Simmons Martin Dengler wrote: James, Thanks for your reply... On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 05:07:15PM -0500, James Simmons wrote: [I]f you want to download books from Gutenberg to the XO check out Read Etexts and see what you think. Thanks - will do. And please know I'm just muttering from the peanut gallery - I'll put my code where my mouth is sometime, hopefully, but I can't now, sorry. So please feel free to ignore me. The scenario I was imagining was: Teacher: Can I get my class to read Shakespeare in Sugar? Imaginary SL person: Sure, just click on Read ETexts and then the Find Books tag. Type Shakespeare, and go from there [at which point project gutenberg, journal items with a special tag, and other sources are queried filtered by Shakespeare to show what books are available for reading]. James Simmons Martin ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Project Gutenberg, etc.
I wonder if you use an ebook reader? An ebook reader, similarly to a music player, needs a good way to organize and find content ON THE MACHINE to read. You aren't usually using it to read from the net -- quite the contrary. Now for a long time I used the browser to search for my books (which were all html -- I'm a sf fan, and have a lot of Baen Books content, both free and purchased). This worked for me because I knew how to transfer the content to my XO and manually unpack it in a place that was consistent and create simple index files. But it was very ad hoc and wouldn't work for the average user. Then I discovered calibre, thanks to a posting on one of these sugar related lists. I switched away from sugar to using Ubuntu for reading. Calibre has multiple parts. One part is an application that imports and catalogs your reading matter. I don't say books, because it is more eclectic than that, encompassing rss feeds, pdf files, etc. The catalog interface has the expected meta-information one would expect: title, author, publisher, subject tags, series, date of acquision. It displays this information in a tabular format and will sort the rows by any of the column headings. This is a great way to access a large collection of reading material. If sugar's journal had an alternate display for materials flagged in a certain way, it could supplant this function, but rather than wait for perfection in the journal, I think it would be better to make this part of calibre, which is written in Python, run under sugar. Calibre also has an ebook reader, so when you select an item in the catalog you can open the book to read. I think this component isn't quite as good as fbreader, which has the ability to rotate the text 90 degrees. Calibre understands multiple formats and can convert among them. One thing it lacks is the ability to import from a URL. (These conversion tools are also available as command line tools). One of the formats it supports is epub, which is an open format for packaging a book -- meaning text, illustrations and metadata into a single file. This is a great way to package reading material, and is what you are finding on more and more free content sites. On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 9:41 AM, James Simmons jim.simm...@walgreens.comwrote: Martin, I hear what you are saying. It sounds like what you want is like iTunes is, but for books. The thing is, it would have to do much more than iTunes does. iTunes has its own catalog of music for purchase. If I search for something on iTunes it doesn't have to go all over the Internet looking for stuff. It doesn't have to check out Usenet newsgroups, torrent sites, etc. It just has to look in its own database. iTunes is for finding music easily and paying for it, not for searching the Internet for free music. Now consider how you might go about looking for free books. You'd want to check out Project Gutenberg. You'd want to look at Project Gutenberg of Australia, which has a ton of stuff by dead authors that is legal there but still under copyright in the U.S. You'd want to check out the Baen Free Library of science fiction, which is under copyright but free to download anyway. You'd want to look at free textbooks from various places. You'd want to check the Internet Archive, and probably many other places too. You don't want iTunes. You want Google for books. This makes me believe that what we really want is some kind of server based portal that finds books. That would be quite a project. Probably more than we'd want to attempt. You could get *most* of the benefit of such a portal by simply putting links to Internet Archive, Gutenberg, and other places on the static start page we ship with the Browse activity. To avoid cluttering up that page we might just have a link on the top reading Free Books. Click on that and another static page comes up which has a ton of links to free book sites, and possibly forms to search on those sites. Maybe some info on the different book formats and what Activities are needed to read them. The other thing that would be nice to have is a sort of Bind Books Activity. The idea is a teacher could look for texts for her class, then use the Bind Books Activity to package them up as Unified Bundles. She would distribute these bundles to her class, perhaps by putting them on a local web server. I think the Unified Bundles idea is really important, because if we had that reading a book would be as simple as clicking on its entry in the Journal, and getting it in the Journal would be as easy as installing an Activity. You wouldn't have to know or care that the book is a plain text file, or a PDF, or a Djvu file, or a Zip file containing images, or a Zip file containing a plain text file, or a collection of HTML and images that can be browsed offline. The person binding the book would know that; the student would not. Older students could bind
Re: [IAEP] Project Gutenberg, etc.
Carol, I don't have an ebook reader, other than my XO. I do have an ipod. Now where the purpose of the ipod is to store your entire music collection in your pocket, and maybe an ebook reader could do the same thing for all your books, up until now I hadn't thought of the XO like that. Since the books are free and always available (unlike books on a Kindle, which you have to pay for and can't trade in at a used book store or loan to anyone) there isn't much incentive to keep the book on the machine once you're done reading it. You can always download it again. When I first wrote Read Etexts I downloaded the complete Burton translation of _1001 Nights_, plus the complete English translation of _The Mahabharata_. I fully intended to keep them on the machine at all times, but I didn't. I only had a few hundred meg storage, so something had to go. After I finished reading Edison's Conquest of Mars by Garrett P. Serviss I blew that away too. On the other hand I do have a large collection of comic books for reading with View Slides on my SD card, which has two gig to play with. Comics take much more room than plain text files, so the SD card is the only place I can keep them. The SD card cannot do everything the Journal can do, including saving meta data like last page number read, so I end up copying the comic from the SD card to the Journal to read it, then deleting it from the Journal afterwards. In any case I've never used my XO like you describe, because I never had enough content on it to need to do that. The normal Journal view has been adequate for me. I'm going to check out Calibre when I can. If I were (hypothetically) to make something like Calibre for the XO it would probably be an Activity that showed you an alternate view of the Journal, except it would only show entries that have a MIME type that might be a book, and it would store meta info for the books, as well as the content type of the book (which the MIME type by itself would not be enough to do). Maybe this Activity would also include the code for Read Etexts, View Slides, etc. as well so you would manage and read your collection with the same Activity. The metadata could be pickled Python objects stored in the Journal. Now that I look at Aleksey's description of the Library activity it sounds pretty similar to this. The thing is the target audience for the XO and Sugar in general may find something like Calibre to be overkill. James Simmons Carol Farlow Lerche wrote: I wonder if you use an ebook reader? An ebook reader, similarly to a music player, needs a good way to organize and find content ON THE MACHINE to read. You aren't usually using it to read from the net -- quite the contrary. Now for a long time I used the browser to search for my books (which were all html -- I'm a sf fan, and have a lot of Baen Books content, both free and purchased). This worked for me because I knew how to transfer the content to my XO and manually unpack it in a place that was consistent and create simple index files. But it was very ad hoc and wouldn't work for the average user. Then I discovered calibre, thanks to a posting on one of these sugar related lists. I switched away from sugar to using Ubuntu for reading. Calibre has multiple parts. One part is an application that imports and catalogs your reading matter. I don't say books, because it is more eclectic than that, encompassing rss feeds, pdf files, etc. The catalog interface has the expected meta-information one would expect: title, author, publisher, subject tags, series, date of acquision. It displays this information in a tabular format and will sort the rows by any of the column headings. This is a great way to access a large collection of reading material. If sugar's journal had an alternate display for materials flagged in a certain way, it could supplant this function, but rather than wait for perfection in the journal, I think it would be better to make this part of calibre, which is written in Python, run under sugar. Calibre also has an ebook reader, so when you select an item in the catalog you can open the book to read. I think this component isn't quite as good as fbreader, which has the ability to rotate the text 90 degrees. Calibre understands multiple formats and can convert among them. One thing it lacks is the ability to import from a URL. (These conversion tools are also available as command line tools). One of the formats it supports is epub, which is an open format for packaging a book -- meaning text, illustrations and metadata into a single file. This is a great way to package reading material, and is what you are finding on more and more free content sites. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org
Re: [IAEP] Project Gutenberg, etc.
I guess we all view the needs of our target audience through the prism of our own experience at their age. I was an avid reader, and a re-reader of favorite books. (Still am, as are many of my women friends -- perhaps this is gender related). So the idea of dumping a book I enjoyed would be anathema to me, especially if my access to the net was not reliable and pervasive. Do try calibre, as it really doesn't seem like overkill to me, except for the format conversion features perhaps. On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 2:10 PM, James Simmons jim.simm...@walgreens.comwrote: Carol, I don't have an ebook reader, other than my XO. I do have an ipod. Now where the purpose of the ipod is to store your entire music collection in your pocket, and maybe an ebook reader could do the same thing for all your books, up until now I hadn't thought of the XO like that. Since the books are free and always available (unlike books on a Kindle, which you have to pay for and can't trade in at a used book store or loan to anyone) there isn't much incentive to keep the book on the machine once you're done reading it. You can always download it again. When I first wrote Read Etexts I downloaded the complete Burton translation of _1001 Nights_, plus the complete English translation of _The Mahabharata_. I fully intended to keep them on the machine at all times, but I didn't. I only had a few hundred meg storage, so something had to go. After I finished reading Edison's Conquest of Mars by Garrett P. Serviss I blew that away too. On the other hand I do have a large collection of comic books for reading with View Slides on my SD card, which has two gig to play with. Comics take much more room than plain text files, so the SD card is the only place I can keep them. The SD card cannot do everything the Journal can do, including saving meta data like last page number read, so I end up copying the comic from the SD card to the Journal to read it, then deleting it from the Journal afterwards. In any case I've never used my XO like you describe, because I never had enough content on it to need to do that. The normal Journal view has been adequate for me. I'm going to check out Calibre when I can. If I were (hypothetically) to make something like Calibre for the XO it would probably be an Activity that showed you an alternate view of the Journal, except it would only show entries that have a MIME type that might be a book, and it would store meta info for the books, as well as the content type of the book (which the MIME type by itself would not be enough to do). Maybe this Activity would also include the code for Read Etexts, View Slides, etc. as well so you would manage and read your collection with the same Activity. The metadata could be pickled Python objects stored in the Journal. Now that I look at Aleksey's description of the Library activity it sounds pretty similar to this. The thing is the target audience for the XO and Sugar in general may find something like Calibre to be overkill. James Simmons Carol Farlow Lerche wrote: I wonder if you use an ebook reader? An ebook reader, similarly to a music player, needs a good way to organize and find content ON THE MACHINE to read. You aren't usually using it to read from the net -- quite the contrary. Now for a long time I used the browser to search for my books (which were all html -- I'm a sf fan, and have a lot of Baen Books content, both free and purchased). This worked for me because I knew how to transfer the content to my XO and manually unpack it in a place that was consistent and create simple index files. But it was very ad hoc and wouldn't work for the average user. Then I discovered calibre, thanks to a posting on one of these sugar related lists. I switched away from sugar to using Ubuntu for reading. Calibre has multiple parts. One part is an application that imports and catalogs your reading matter. I don't say books, because it is more eclectic than that, encompassing rss feeds, pdf files, etc. The catalog interface has the expected meta-information one would expect: title, author, publisher, subject tags, series, date of acquision. It displays this information in a tabular format and will sort the rows by any of the column headings. This is a great way to access a large collection of reading material. If sugar's journal had an alternate display for materials flagged in a certain way, it could supplant this function, but rather than wait for perfection in the journal, I think it would be better to make this part of calibre, which is written in Python, run under sugar. Calibre also has an ebook reader, so when you select an item in the catalog you can open the book to read. I think this component isn't quite as good as fbreader, which has the ability to rotate the text 90 degrees. Calibre understands multiple formats and can convert among them. One thing it
