Books, Sugar and OLPC
Posted by Sayamindu 5 months ago
Articles and posts like this (and subsequently this) underline the need for a status report about ebook-reading in Sugar and in the XO laptops. For the past few months, apart from my usual duties, I have been working on the book-reading stack for OLPC and Sugar, and this may be viewed as a progress report of the things I have been doing.
I have been mostly working on the Read Activity in Sugar, which is supposed to do the most heavy lifting as far as book-reading goes – though there is also ReadEtexts by Jim Simmons, which primarily handles plain text files from Project Gutenberg (the latest version of ReadEtexts supports RTF files as well). Currently, the ebook formats that are supported in Sugar include
- Epub
- DJVU
- Plain Text (specifically the format used by Project Gutenberg)
- Postscript
- CBZ
- RTF
There also exists a sugar-ified FBReader, with support for more formats (such as plucker and non DRM’ed mobipocket).
With the last major release of Read (a part of Sugar 0.86), apart from the addition of Epub support, there has been usability improvements and tweaks (particularly for the full-screen mode), as well as support for bookmarks (notes can be associated with each bookmark).
For the next major release, I have started to work on support for highlighting text (at least in Epub files) and better usage of the XO “game-keys” in fullscreen mode (so that the overall experience in tablet mode of the XO laptops become smoother). Interestingly, highlighting text did not work out as I had planned, since the highlights became almost invisible in the grayscale reflective mode of the XO laptops. So instead of highlighting, Read would probably support underlining of text (when I was a kid, we often shared books, especially school books, and I was told it is always better to underline with a pencil than to use a marker pen to highlight 
.
Of course, Read is only one part of the book-reading puzzle. There has to be a system in place for book acquisition as well (from the Internet as well as from a local schoolserver, if available). In a previous blog post, I mentioned Open Publication Distribution System, which is built upon the Atom syndication format to allow online book distributors to publish their catalog. I extended Jim Simmon’s Get Internet Archive Books activity to support OPDS, and now, apart from the Internet Archive, the preview version that I have can also retrieve books from Feedbooks. Here’s a video of the activity in action:
The next major step would be to implement a server side OPDS implementation in the School Server (XS), as well as some kind of caching mechanism to conserve bandwidth (if a copy of a book is found in the school server, it should be downloaded instead of the online version).
To keep up with the progress, you can either subscribe to the sugar-devel list or the more specialized (and low volume) olpc-bookreader list.
Evince as well reads cbr and cb7 files and cbt files support is on the queu [1]
The implementations are based on third party compression tools. The problem with cbr files is that the best one tool is freeware, not free software.
[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=588266
Read Etexts can be used to read any plain text file, not just those from Project Gutenberg. The most recent version supports word wrap for texts that need it.
View Slides can read .cbz files without installing any other software, and like Read Etexts it works in Sugar .82 so you can use them on your XO.
Both programs currently support multiple bookmarks and page annotations. Read Etexts also supports highlighting passages (yellow background plus underline) and text to speech with word highlighting.
Read Etexts has its own built in book search based on offline catalogs provided by Project Gutenberg and Project Gutenberg Australia. It’s not as good as an OPDS solution would be, but as a stopgap its pretty handy.