On Fri, May 1, 2009 at 8:12 AM, James Simmons <[email protected]> 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!) > [email protected] > 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!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
