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).

• Pootle migration: We are moving the OLPC/Sugarlabs Pootle instance to a newer dedicated server, which should speed it up considerably. This has also given me some opportunity to fine-tune and polish our l10n workflow – things should be a bit more easier and smoother (and faster) for translators. I also managed to gather some interesting data from the log and user registration files. It turns out that we have more than 1000 translators registered with the system, among whom about half have actively contributed translations in the past one year. I’m not sure what the user statistics for other Pootle installations are like, but it seems that we are one of the larger users of Pootle out there.
• Read hacking: I have been also spending some time hacking on Read. While Mr Super Awesome Tomeu has been pushing our Evince patches upstream, I have been working on a few interesting features for Read (we have moved to Gitorious, which is so cool):
  • Support for books from the Universal Library: Many of the scanned childrens’ book from the Universal Library Project are too graphics heavy for the XO hardware to be handled in PDF form. However, it looks like the project also stores the book as zip files with each scanned page archived inside the zip file as individual jpegs – which in other words, is very similar to the comic book archive format which Evince (Read’s backend) supports quite nicely. More importantly, this format seems to have lesser performance issues on the XO hardware (compared to graphics heavy PDF files). So I have been making sure that Read also handles this format gracefully.
    
  • Bookmarks support:This has been one of the oft requested features for Read, apart from annotations. The original design specs for Read already provided me with ideas on how the UI should look like, so with some amount of coding, I have bookmark support which mostly works . I am also trying to do the implementation in such a way so that it would be easy to add support for sharing of bookmarks later on in the future. If anyone is interested in doing a project, contact me (hint.. hint )
    

  Code for the above lives in the sayamindu-sandbox branch of Read’s Git repository. I plan to take a stab at annotations during the next few weeks – I have some ideas which, with some luck, may work. I also have some plans about a saner full-screen/ebook mode for Read – let’s see if I get the time to implement those as well.

• This came up in one of the mailing lists a few days back. Serves as a reminder as to why the work we all do is so relevant and so important.

• There might be a Barcamp Kolkata soon:
  
• Got Table of Content support working in Read Activity
  
• Wrote a small PDF viewer tool with support for the Journal which is then used by mozplugger to show PDF files within Browse. (You can put the file in your journal if you like it)
  
• Infoslicer is awesome. Here’s a Youtube video demo of it.
  
  
  

Over the past few weekends, I have been working on a few (semi)hobby projects.

• Conversion of XKB data to M17N tables
  I discovered pyparsing while working on this. The tool I wrote is supposed to extract the data out of XKB symbol files, and convert them into a format which can be easily modified into M17N db files. In fact, for some keyboard layouts, the output was directly usable in m17n (via SCIM), without any kind of direct modification at all.
  The only problem with the script is that the parsing of the XKB symbol files take a significant amount of time, but in the end, it does provide something useful. [Gitweb]
• An image viewer activity for Sugar
  Sugar did not have a nice Image Viewer activity which I liked, so over the weekend, I hacked together a small activity which would perform the basic stuff expected of an image viewer (zoom, rotation, etc). [Gitweb]