Soon, your Read Activity is gonna be overflowing with content. Internet Archive director Brewster Kahle, made a great announcement at the Boston Book Festival:
Brewster Kahle & XO laptop
All 1.6 million books digitized so far by the Internet Archive, the San Francisco-based non-profit dedicated to the universal sharing of knowledge, will be available free to children around the world who have laptops built by the Cambridge, MA-based One Laptop Per Child Foundation (OLPC)
Does anyone know how this will work, exactly? Will we need to connect to an online repository? Or will these eBooks come as SD cards - with each card having a different selection fo books so children have to share to get an entire library?
Yet my greatest question is if this content will also be available to those who Give One Get One'ed (G1G1) in 2007 and 2008. I would home that the 100,000+ XO laptop users in North America, the third largest deployment for OLPC, get the same access to content as everyone else. Especially since the Internet Archive and OLPC will need our support.
These Internet Archive books are not in PDF format, but have been scanned using optical character recognition software to transform images into digital text, and children will need experienced readers to correct typographical errors via Internet Archive's Wiki-like typo correction system.
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The books are available to anyone today in various formats.
The announcement I guess is referring to compatibility with the newer ebub-supporting versions of the Read Activity.
However, it will not work on G1G1 machines with os767/802. It needs Fedora11/Sugar 0.84 and then some more libraries for the XO builds to work. See here for more
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2009-September/018850.html
Unless is referring to 'Get internet archive books"
( http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar/addon/4194 ) activity that works ok G1G1 on XOs but this is available long time now.
So we now need a distributed version of the PGDP project. Intriguing idea.
The Archive's 1.7 million books are downloadable by anybody. The difference is that they're improving the ways to search for and access them (e.g. via openlibrary.org which has a wiki page for every book ever published)
The big difference seems to be that somebody wrote an actual book reader for the XO -- that lets you flip the screen over and use the buttons to read! I've been waiting for that for years. (I tried to hire Don Hopkins to do it -- he discovered that those accessible keys didn't have any encodings assigned in X, and it took more than a year for OLPC to fix that. Etc, etc, etc.) Anyway, I'm glad there's a half-decent book reader, and I hope it's the standard Read activity, though I think it may be something else that I saw demoed at the Internet Archive last month.
It is the standard Read Activity. I'm trying to make the keybindings better, though some oddball bugs in X are making my life difficult.
The next versions are going to be better :-)
Please keep the bug reports coming in.
I'm working as fast as I can to make things work everywhere (and that includes the XO-1).
A minor update on offline access : http://lists.laptop.org/pipermail/bookreader/2009-November/000115.html