Hello, Get Books Activity is a friendly fork of Jim Simmon's Get Internet Archive Books activity and it allows Sugar users to search for and download Ebooks from various sources. One of the major points of concern for many was this activity required Internet access, and I have tried to address that issue with this release.
The activity can now access catalogs in removable devices (pen drives, etc) and lets the user search through these catalogs. A removable device with a catalog will show up in the list of sources from which the books can be downloaded/copied. Utilizing this feature, one will be able to copy thousands of ebooks in a pen-drive, put a catalog file (catalog.xml) in the root[1] directory of the device, and send it to bandwidth starved areas. (think of a library on a stick ;-) Apart from the above features, this release also has some subtle changes in the behavior which will hopefully make the overall use experience better. (for example, changing the source in the middle of a search will trigger a new search within the new selected source) I do not consider this release to be stable, so I have not uploaded it to ASLO yet (I had to do a lot more refactoring that I would have liked to get the removable device support working). To download the activity (it should work with Sucrose 0.82 upwards), follow the link: http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/GetBooks-3.xo To test the removable device support, in a USB drive, unzip http://dev.laptop.org/~sayamindu/books_on_a_stick.zip [2] (make sure that the catalog.xml file stays in the toplevel directory of the drive), and plug the USB drive in wherever you are running Sugar. Get Books is _supposed_ to detect removable devices as and when they are plugged in/removed, but if your device does not show up, try restarting the activity before trying anything else. Thanks, Sayamindu [1] Of course, manually cataloging thousands of books is a PITA, so I will soon release something like the Fedora LiveCD script - which will let you choose a directory of EPUB files and a USB disk, and generate the catalog, as well as convert the EPUBs to PDFs (with the corresponding linking in the catalog) so that older builds can read the files. [2] After uploading the zip I realized that the PDFs in the zip might be a bit too heavy for the XO and similar machines - apologies for that. The Epubs work fine on XO-1.5 and newer versions of Sugar [3] Chappal, in case you are wondering is the South Asian generic term for flip-flops/sandals. I hate wearing sneakers :-) -- Sayamindu Dasgupta [http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings] _______________________________________________ Sugar-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
