I spent the weekend at Pune, attending the Fedora Activity Day. Apart from the usual hallway conversations and discussions, I gave a short talk on life as a Fedora downstream project, where I described some of the issues we face while building the OLPC OS (which is a Fedora derivative). Rahul has posted a nice summary of my talk, along with possible ways to address some of the issues I outlined during the talk.
Apart from the talk, I worked with Kushal to package accessx – I came up with the patches which made it build-able on F-13. Kushal and I also worked on adding support for cover images to the Pathagar Book Server we have been working on, and I think it looks good for a release at the moment.

Its all over the web now – the Internet Archive has opened up over 1.6 million books for the OLPC XO laptops and in general, any machine running Sugar. Before going into anything else, it makes sense to provide a more specific meaning of “opening up” here – it involves two main objectives completed at the Internet Archive end:

• Making sure that the books are readable in the XO, keeping in mind its relative low-end hardware specs and disk-space limitations
• Ensuring that the books are available via a standardized catalog format, so that one can find, browse and download books easily using a tool more tuned for the purpose (think of feed-readers versus blog-entries in a web-page)

Now that the books are available (not just from the Internet Archive, but from a number of other sources as well), the next step is to figure out the best possible ways to actually make these books available to the XO and Sugar users. The major constraining factor is bandwidth, we do have deployments with zero, or very limited Internet connectivity, and perhaps these are the deployments which need access to these books the most. I spent most of this week working on implementing a feature in the Get Books activity which would allow books to be distributed via what has been jokingly called a sneaker-net (or sandalnet/chappalnet, if you prefer those forms of footwear). The idea is very simple – at a centralized location with Internet access, choose a few thousand books (size of a typical book is usually a few hundred KB or less), put them in a USB pen-drive and add a OPDS catalog to the mix. Make copies of the drive, and send them to the schools without connectivity. The latest version of Get Books would recognize the drive, and let the student browse through the collection, search for books, and add whatever she wants to the Sugar Journal. Once a book is in the Journal, it can be shared among all the students using the Journal object transfer support in Sugar, or via the Read Activity directly. So essentially, you get a Library on a Stick, with thousands of books, something which, till now, in its physical form, has been largely restricted to better equipped (and usually richer) schools.
Of course, even larger collections can be distributed if a School Server (XS) is present in the mix (due to the fact that the school server can have a larger disk in it), and support for this type of distribution method involving the XS would hopefully appear within the next few releases of Get Books.

The inspiration for this post comes from a talk by Alan Kay, entitled Beyond the Printing Press: Computers as Learning Environments for All Children. You can view the video recording of the talk here


The development versions of Read Activity is now shipping with Epub support. This makes me excited for quite a few reason. Of course, the most obvious reason to get excited is the fast growth and adoption of Epub as a standard for e-books. However, there is more to it…
Books, once again (after Gutenberg’s time) are changing. Gutenberg brought in the transition from hand-written books to large-scale print – and now we see yet another shift, where books are transitioning from ink, paper and the printing press to bits stored inside a variety of devices. Towards the beginning of the printing press revolution, there was a strong desire and tendency to mimic the “old” format as much as possible, in terms of look and feel. Gutenberg and his associates even hand-drew illuminated decoration on the Gutenberg Bibles, to retain the similarity to the older, handwritten copies of the Bible. In what seems to be an almost eerie repetition, today, in the ebook, we see a strong desire to mimic the traditional book as much as possible. (eg ebook readers trying to retain the older “UI” paradigm, efforts to make ebooks retain the formatting niceties of traditional books, etc). This is not unusual, or wrong. We are used to the traditional book, and it is important to make the path to transition as smooth as possible.
However, what makes me really excited at this stage is something else. It is the potential new things we could do with Ebooks, things that would not have been possible with books in the old format. This weekend, I did some changes to a Epub file, and extended the Read Activity a bit to come up with a few such things:

• Audio-visual content inside books: This is almost obvious – with the transition to books which are read on devices having audio/video capabilities, the next logical step is to embed these into books.
  
  
  
  (Video from the Internet Archive, text from Wikipedia)
• An interactive shell inside a book: An interactive Python shell inside a book teaching Python, so that small examples and snippets can be tried out inside the book, right away.
  
  
  
  (Text from How to Think like a Computer Scientist, Python edition)
• A full blown, interactive environment inside books: A book on digital logic can have a small sandboxing area, where readers could connect the various virtual components together, and see what happens.
  
  
  
  (Text from Wikipedia and the Lorem Ipsum generator, demo from the Etoys project)

Of course, this is just a proof of concept, and probably most Epub readers will simply ignore the interactive content part. Moreover, there may be security issues with such books as well (the idea of having a Python shell inside a book will make many nervous) – but I think this is where Bitfrost, and its software implementation, Rainbow (which is essentially an isolation shell) comes in.
There is another way of “interaction” which I have not covered in the above screencasts – and this is something which is already available in traditional ink and paper books, especially text-books. Ebooks need to support “exercises” like fill-in-the-blanks, multiple-choice-questions, etc. There is an urgent need to support this, and this should be done in a standardized way. The local storage standard associated with HTML5 seems to be a possible way forward, though probably there might be better ways to do this (especially if we want the ability to have teachers remotely check and evaluate exercises done on e-textbooks).

For the past few weeks, I have been spending most of my time implementing Epub support for Sugar’s Read activity. Epub is gaining increasing acceptance, and a few weeks back, Project Gutenberg started distributing many of their material in the format, and Google + Sony also seem to have started to distribute a large chunk of public domain books as Epubs.

Today I finally reached the stage where the work could be tested on an actual XO, and here’s how it looks:

The rendering is done using WebkitGTK (the Python bindings) and I was a bit concerned about the possible performance issues on the XO-1 (which has a relatively ancient processor, slow filesystem access, only 256 MB of RAM and no swap). The biggest worry was the loading time – since it involves pre-rendering the entire book to gather metrics for pagination (most Epub books I have come across do not have clearly defined page-breaks, so that has to be figured out), but to my surprise (and relief) the load time turned out to be quite acceptable.

Right now, the viewer supports a very limited subset of the Epub standard (and works only with XHTML based Epubs), but so far it has managed to handle all the files I have tested it with. The viewer is a standalone widget used by the , which should make it possible reuse the work to develop a Epub reader for GNOME as well.

Once the Epub support in Read reaches an acceptable state, the plan is to start working on implementing support for the draft Open Publication Distribution System specs, which allows ebook distributors to distribute e-books via XML catalogues. It makes sense to support this in Read, as well as in the school server, to ease the e-books distribution process. For example, if we have a large e-book collection for a particular deployment, it may not make sense to put all of them in individual laptops – instead allowing the user to browse/search the catalogue and download the books as and when required would probably be a better option.