ePub for the OLPC laptop: Read Activity now does it. Hooray!
Psst! While One Laptop Per Child certainly hasn’t exactly been playing this up, the latest Read Activity for the XO laptops can handle the ePub e-book format.
Gary C. Martin, a programmer with Sugar Labs, kindly updated me.
Go here for the details, or click on the image for a better view. I love surprises like this! I wonder if the spin-off of the Sugar environment development from the main OLPC efforts helped make a difference.
Strategically, this is wonderful news since Read is the main reading activity on the OLPC laptop, and since the machines will now be able to read nonDRMed books from major publishers. One neat twist: Read can even display annotations. Notice the words inside the little rectangle? Awesome.
Way to go—for all concerned! And thanks to TeleRead’s Chris Meadows for jogging me to check up on the OLPC—after, for so many months, I’d been disappointed.
So, OLPC laptop users, give ePub a try if you have a recent Read and let me know what the results are. How does the current Read compare to FBReader—also ePub capable—on the XO machines? Which features should one pick up from the other? How about performance? Which is faster?
Detail: It’ll be fun to see if the OLPC wiki mentions ePub in the Read listing, now that I’ve spotlighted it. You know: “Using versions X, Y and Z, you can read ePub.”
October 14th, 2009 at 2:22 pm
I have posted a short status report on bookreading on the OLPC laptops (and in the Sugar environment in general) at http://sayamindu.randomink.org/ramblings/2009/10/14/books-sugar-and-olpc/