E-reading still neglected by the OLPC laptop folks? Yep—at least for now. But the future may be brighter.
Nope, we aren’t covering the OLPC’s XO-1 laptops the way we used to—and with reason.
I just don’t hear much talk about e-book software. The XO-1 is still more of a hacker’s companion than a book reader’s friend. Result? I’m not nearly as excited about it as in the past.
Efforts have been underway to make FBReader a true denizen of the Sugar environment, but this is too little too late. What a shame. Imagine the boost that the laptops with a properly adapted FBReader app could give to literacy and publishing in developing countries.
Meanwhile, as reported by OLPC News and seen in the accompanying video, the OLPC folks have clearly made speed improvements in the XO-1.5 model. Oh, and there’s full-screen video playback. Yes. Talk about priorities. Screw e-reader apps. Let’s do good video.
The good news is that the next generation of the of OLPC laptop hardware may be better suited for e-reading. Maybe the software will be better.
Let’s just hope that OLPC’s XO-2—photo shows a prototype—will come with a nice USB port for a physical keyboard. How I hate the virtual kind for prolonged use. But the XO-2 may still be a winner for reading itself, complete with dual screens—just like the rumored Microsoft (non)tablet.
If I were a Bertelsmann exec, I’d take an interest in this baby as a long-term market-developer, just so I didn’t compromise OLPC’s mission, which is to educate kids, not exploit them for short-term corporate purposes. In fact, the rival Murdoch interests, at least in the past, have supported the OLPC project.
$75 price in time
The XO-2’s price is supposedly to be a mere $75 in time. Why isn’t the Democratic Leadership Council writing about these possibilities—and for the States, not just overseas—rather than coming out with a “Kindle in Every Backpack” proposal? Talk about America’s corporately driven political system!
Bottom line: I haven’t given up on the OLPC machines. I’m just underwhelmed by the current ones, and the lack of more interest in decent e-reading software that, like FBReader, could read ePub. Here’s looking ahead to the XO-2 and hoping that OLPC’s current funding challenges won’t kill it!
Related: BBC blog post and one user’s argument that the current XO-1 is unusable for a teenager. Of course, the XO-1 really was designed for smaller children.
September 25th, 2009 at 7:26 am
Considering it was “hackers” and private developers who created the first e-book readers for other platforms, it might have been expected that those same software pioneers would create readers for the OLPC.
Unfortunately, as the device is targeted at children, I suppose the pioneers weren’t interested in bothering with something they themselves would likely not use.
This doesn’t mean it won’t happen. But before it does, the product will need to make a significant market impact, so the big players will consider the possibilities that the pioneers ignored. After all, hooking kids on a product or service can result in lifetime customers… ask Disney…
September 25th, 2009 at 8:46 am
Please be aware that the Sugar Learning Platform and Activities for children have not been developed by OLPC since April 2008, when the Sugar Labs foundation was created by Walter Bender. Any discussion of e-reader software for the OLPC XO-1 or XO-1.5 should include the different readers available from the Sugar Activities Library (http://activities.sugarlabs.org/en-US/sugar). We are excited about the Read Etexts and Get Internet Archive Books Activities (both by James Simmons), the updated Read Activity, and the recently added Gcompris Activities. The sugar-devel list is a good place to find out the status of Activities, see for example: http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/sugar-devel/2009-June/015859.html. Note that you don’t need an XO laptop to test these Activities; Sugar on a Stick (http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Sugar_on_a_Stick/Strawberry) will boot just about any PC and many Macs.
September 25th, 2009 at 9:07 am
Big thanks for the update, Sean. May it be useful t the XO owners out there! So can any of these do ePub? And why isn’t the OLPC site playing up this software, even if the development is from outside the organization?
Thanks,
David
September 25th, 2009 at 3:04 pm
So we sent some of our books to the Nepal OLPC project as PDF and not sure how they are using them but from what we hear, it’s worked just fine. I don’t know the technical details but would be interested to know why a specialised book reader, rather than a plain PDF one, would work better?
Some background on these books here: http://blog.prathambooks.org/2009/07/pratham-books-reaches-nepal-through.html
Also, it’s hard work trying to give our content away!
September 25th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
Hi David,
You asked about ePub. The latest version of the Read activity (by Sayamindu Dasgupta) for Sugar 0.86 supports the ePub format, though I believe some support of ePub was in earlier Read releases. Here’s a link to latest release notes (just in the middle of this new Sugar release so apologies that notes are still being updated):
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/0.86/Read
Regards,
–Gary
September 26th, 2009 at 8:07 am
Hey, could someone please explain why a PDF wouldn’t suffice for an eBook? We sent some of our CC licensed books to the Nepal OLPC project and they seem happy with the outcomes.
http://blog.prathambooks.org/2009/07/pratham-books-reaches-nepal-through.html
We’d like to do more and would be interested in hearing the alternatives.
Also, giving away content to the OLPC projects is difficult!
September 26th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
I’d like to add to what Sean has said. The latest Read supports PDF, epub, and Djvu. There are over a million free books in these formats at the Internet Archive. Read Etexts supports plain text files, plus RTF, which gives you the 24,000 books at Project Gutenberg and another 4,000 at Project Gutenberg Australia, plus the Baen Free Library of recent science fiction books and more. Read Etexts can also do text to speech with word highlighting. It can also browse the Project Gutenberg offline catalogs to make it really easy to find and download books without visiting the website.
View Slides can read comic books in the .cbz format.
Get Internet Archive Books is a friendly interface to the Internet Archive book catalog, which makes it really easy to browse and download free books from there without visiting that website.
I use Read Etexts every day at work to read books on my XO. Some of the books I’ve read recently include “Odd John” by Olaf Stapledon, “Little Brother” by Cory Doctorow, “A Thousand Nights and a Night” translated by Richard Burton, “The Creatures of Man” by Howard L. Myers and “The Two Faces of Tommorow” by James P. Hogan. All these books were free.
There is more work to be done to make Sugar a first rate reading platform, but we’ve made a lot more progress than your article gives us credit for.
James Simmons
September 27th, 2009 at 3:38 am
Gautam and James:
G: For picture books, when no other alternatives exist, then PDFs would make sense. But as an OLPC laptop owner at the time, I found that PDFs were sheer torture on a small screen. Re commercial content. that is a Good Thing, and via licensing agreements with libraries or otherwise, it could be made available. Small children are the laptop’s main users. But let’s not neglect others.
J: It would be great if OLPC were better at letting the world know that the Reader can now do ePub. Needless to say, I was delighted to be able to do a follow-up calling attention to the new capability.
Thanks,
David