TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

The OLPC laptop as a promising school and library machine–plus detailed e-reading tips for people lucky enough to own XOs already

By David Rothman

One Laptop Per Child’s green machine could be a world-changer for schools, libraries and e-book-lovers lucky enough to own XO-1s.

I’ve said so from afar for eons. Now, having played with my XO for a week and a half—and yes, play is an apt word to use about a child’s machine–I’ll speak up even more passionately despite the flaws of OLPC and the hardware itself.

The fact that Mary Lou Jepsen, the organization’s founding CTO, will create her own line of handhelds increases my faith in the basic OLPC idea. I love her plans to commercialize the technology in socially useful ways and even aim for a $75 laptop. I’ve been waiting for this a long time. She’ll undoubtedly add new twists at Pixel Qi, reflecting the ingenuity she showed in coming up with the stunning screen technology that distinguishes the XO from, say, the Asus Eee PC or the Intel ClassMate. If you care about books and literacy, you need to care about screens; and the XO’s LCD is much, much sharper than my quick snapshot, made without a tripod, suggests.

FBReader: Salvation for XO owners who hate PDF

On the negative, the XO-bundled reading software is primitive right now and is too PDF-centered. But you can install FBReader, free, and enjoy books in HTML, TXT, RTF, Plucker and other formats, including nonencrypted Mobipocket, as well as the IPDF’s .epub format, on which leading publishers will be standardizing as a distribution format and ideally a consumer one, too. Later in this post I’ll provide detailed FBReader tips for people who are already using XOs or setting them up for others. The XO is not optimized for public library use now, even though, as a more rugged machine and without troublesome terms of service, it would be a far better choice than the $400 Kindle. But maybe my FBReader tips will help librarians appreciate XO-class hardware and work with the open source community to develop the iPod-easy apps for the machines—well, assuming that Nicholas Negroponte and crew can show more of an interest in public libraries, especially here in the States, than they have so far. The good new is that an OLPC America, a spinoff from OLPC itself, is on the way and ideally will enjoy full cooperation at both the state and federal levels.

I’ll not be bashful about where I’m headed. In a nutshell, U.S. presidential candidates should take just a little time off from Iraq debates and haircut critiques and start asking, “Why aren’t we handing out XO-type gizmos by the millions to American school kids and carefully blending them in with our school and library systems? Or at least creating a core institutional market so that they’ll go on sale someday for $49.95 at Walmart?”

Cruel twist

The actual hardware, yes, can exist for a TeleRead scenario—of a well-stocked national digital library system, with ways for even low-income families to read e-books—to unfold in the United States. As badly as students in Peru and Mongolia need help, it’s a cruel twist that they will be learning on XOs while those in New Orleans slums and rural West Virginia must do for now without this kid magnet of a machine.

Birmingham, Alabama, to its vast credit, has agreed to order 15,000 XOs for its schools, and I suspect other districts and even states will be doing likewise, now that OLPC America is coming, with a focus on the state level. Until now, institutional K-12 purchases here in the States have not been a major OLPC priority—which is a shame. Was OLPC in fear of teachers unions and of hostility to the constructivist philosophy? Did it feel that its low-powered hardware couldn’t compete in the States and that it would be better off marketing to countries in the developing world? Who knows. I can say is that the XO has enough redeeming traits to make up for the inability to run the most powerful software and create the most elaborate multimedia works. The incredible screen, which can emit light at night like a normal LCD but be E Ink-reflective in bright sunshine, with the glow available for cloudy days, is enough by itself to win an e-book guy over. But that isn’t even to mention the XO’s reason for existence, its K-12 potential.

More than a kid magnet—and the right software could make it still better

The XO, you see, is more than a stylish green toy. It’s a complete system of learning designed to foster both curiosity and creativity—with not just a word-processing tool, for example, but also a video camera and music-creation software.

You might think of the XO as a No Child Left Behind in reverse. NCLB’s emphasis is on teaching to tests, on drill and kill, while the OLPC seeks to inculcate a love of learning and self-expression. We need a balance between approaches, and the green machine can help achieve it.

No, the XO and its bundled software aren’t perfect. The Sugar interface on the Fedora linux could be simpler in places, for example, even though it should be easier for young people to learn if they don’t come with preconceived notions from Windows. Here’s a handy key guide if you own an XO and you or the people around you are still adjusting.

Child-intuitive

That said, there’s plenty intuitive about Sugar in a nice, simplified, child-oriented way. The X-like icon in the center of the screen bears your name when you glide the cursor over it. You click on it to reboot, shut down or, if the XO is used for education, register.

Surrounding the X—which, as has been said before, looks like a small child, with a circle above the X, serving as the head—are icons for applications such as word-processing or Web browsing or music making. You reach them up through an Activities menu at the bottom of the screen. And then, presto, they pop up around the X.

When you click on one of the icons near the circle, you can make the activity vanish, or you can resume it if you’ve temporarily left it for another activity. A learning journal icon remains near the X icon, and by clicking on it, you can see what past activities you’ve been involved with and pick up where you left off—a very significant educational feature that I’d hate to see lost amid the clutter of a standard Windows interface.

Needed: A library icon on the opening screen and better browsing and reading software

Now let me switch back to the complaint mode. The XO display technology glorifies books; its startup screen disses them. Right on the first screen, I’d love to see a library icon, which could lead to an easy but powerful searching tool to help students and teachers find just the right books. If nothing else, a library icon should be part of the Activities menu at the bottom of the screen–as opposed to simply letting the kids forage around the World Wide Web, via the XO’s feature-short browser. Users and institutions could choose where the library icon led, ideally with interfaces coordinated with the book-sources involved. The lack of a library icon is truly regrettable for a machine intended to excel as an e-reader.

Also, as noted, I’m grumpy about the PDF reading software. PDFs generally don’t work out well on small screens like the XO’s; the page breaks happen in the wrong places, or you must scroll from left to right to follow a line of text to the end. Although sites such as Feedbooks and Manybooks.net let you create customized PDFs, most online sources of books do not. Besides, I’d hate to see K-12 students bother with such complexities or have their reading choices limited. It would be far, far better for the XO to use a reflowable format like the IDPF’s new .epub standard, which, beyond being recognized by major publishers, lets the lines wrap just where they should and is also more accessible to the disabled. There is talk of reflowable PDF reading on the Sony Reader PRS-505. But I wonder how this will really be relevant to the XO.

In a related vein, among other formats, the OLPC flavor of an Evince-based program is to read DJVU, which some at OLPLC love. But with a somewhat PDFish philosphy, the image-based DJVU will probably be more convenient for people creating documents than for those reading them. While DJVU and PDF books beat no books, at least the most popular works should be in reflowable formats like .epub, which, in fact, huge commercial publishers like Hachette will be using. Tricky issues remain for .epub, such as whether an accompanying DRM standard will emerge, and, of course, we know that DRM is a K-12-e-book toxin, not just a commercial one—it is a threat to fair use and the permanence of books as a medium. Still, a common core format shared with the commercial and academic publishers would at least be a start. One answer, for serious e-book-lovers, then, is the FBReader. which has basic .epub capabilities and most likely will be adding more, such as CSS—see the home page here. It can also, as noted, read TXT, nonencrypted Mobipocket and a bunch of other formats. I’d liked to see FBReader simplifed and for K-12 students and blended in smoothly for the XO’s interface.

Later in this post, as promised, I’ll include tips for installing FBReader and the Opera browser, both of which might be too difficult for some young students to use, but not necessarily for all. These are just two example of the possibilities. Big point is that the hardware exists for the open source community to build on with improved software. Even companies such as Microsoft could benefit in some ways, since open source and the standard commercial programs can strengthen each other, as IBM, a major open source proponent, could probably vouch. I’m writing this post with a Microsoft blogging tool, even though TeleBlog proudly uses the open source WordPress, one of the apps that the tool works with.

The heart of the XO’s software

The heart of the XO’s software suite is the learning journal through which students and teachers can return to their old activities and easily retrieve Web pages already viewed. Yes, the software is a bit buggy right now; we’re not talking about slick commercial programs. The “return to” capabilities, for example, don’t always work. But thanks to XO’s open philosophy, the K-12 and library communities will get something back in return for the break-in pains: a chance to collaborate with the open source software community and gain new flexibility and economy, compared to, “Let Microsoft do it.”

I hate this talk of Windows going on the XO, at least not unless it can be reinvented with a Sugar-simple interface and Bill Gates and friend will open-source their OS. Lots of luck on the latter, huh? Fergit, then. I hope that OLPC will continue to let linux be the main show despite acknowledged plans to collaborate with Microsoft. Ideally the K-12 community will be patient with open source even if the documentation often is lacking. Wikis are valuable as precursors for more formal documentation and can go a long way toward addressing how-to issues. The trick is to test beta apps well and prepare the teachers, via Wikis and otherwise, so that they know of the wealth of resources online and can use the software.

The XO as a copyright zealot’s nightmare—and an opportunity for forward-looking writers and publishers

Especially in the textbook area, publishers, too, not just educators, will need to shift gears. When students download a PDF for display in the Evince-based program, the XO’s actually asks children if they want to share it.

Perhaps publishers in many cases will want to think about a mix of social DRM and a deviation from current business models. They may make less money off original content in some cases than from providing Net-hip experts to help teachers and students create good-looking and factual Wikis and customized, spur-of-the-moment books.

Don’t take content creation for granted. Most teachers are too busy teaching to to be authors in a major, formal sense or to participate actively in Wikis. My sister has worked decades as a teacher and, now, a teacher-mentor. Ask her how much she would have appreciate the extra duties when she was stretched. While students can and should be creators, they need close supervision to maintain quality—and some good core material on which to build the Wikis. Yes, a natural function for publishers and authors!

Subject experts from the higher-ed community can help, but aren’t a full solution. They are too busy doing original research, consulting, writing textbooks for pay, you name it. Maybe the educational publishers need to provide the means through which authors can run wikis for pay and use them as fact-checked source material for core texts.

The book-Wiki relationship

Not to play down the importance of traditional books or to pass over the XO’s weaknesses compared to the Sony Reader or the Amazon Kindle. I want book downloading to be as easy as music on an iPod—so that students can click on a library icon on the start-up screen and see categories of books, or easily search among tags and search words, through a catalogue filled with colorful, enticing images.

The current XO is too Webcentric; a little more attention, please for books, which can encourage the development of sustained thoughts more than can just the reading of Web pages. Words form sentences; sentences form paragraphs; paragraphs form chapters; chapters form books, the top of the text pyramid for individual works. Let’s not slice off the the top. Granted, with some reference books, it doesn’t matter where you stop or start. And teachers and school districts want to be free to pick and choose and organize lessons in sequences they want. But the best textbooks and other expository works tend to be simple early on, then progress to a more complex level, providing a clear path for learners, especially when internal and external hyperlinks can be used to reinforce explanations.

I’d love to see some Wikis—reflecting the actual needs and usability concerns of actual learners—evolve into textbooks. The XO can be an important part of this process by expanding the audience of testers and other readers. The Wiki concept is too good to be reserved just for developing technical documentation.

The XO and importance of narrative

But what about something that to me is as important as exposition and maybe even more so, narrative? I know that some tech-oriented librarians and computer geeks would downplay fiction and other narrative; and I suspect it has to do with the mindset that comes with technology. Once you’ve set up your machine, the big question becomes exactly the same as in Microsoft’s Windows ballyhoo, “Where do you want to go today?” Such a question actually jibes well with the constructivist philosophy of curiosity-driven learning, and regardless of the commercialism associated with the phrase, I heartily approve.

Just as we need balance between books and the Web, however, so do we need it between constructivism and an appreciation of life’s immutable sequences. Fiction and other narrative can provide that; what better place to begin than through the reading of such works as David Copperfield, the first chapter of which bears an apt title: “I am born.” Yes, novels can have flashback and other devices, but generally events happen because they unfold in a certain sequence. Isn’t time the ultimate algorithm? The core fact of David Copperfield’s life is his being orphaned . You cannot route around it, Internet fashion. No, you need to absorb this, along with the accompanying emotions, which Dickens can impart better than any textbook or Wiki writer, in order to understand what follows. I’m not suggesting that students on a Peruvian mountaintop start out with Dickens, but surely they can do the same with novelists meaningful to them.

Such thoughts would not seem to relate to the development of vocational skills. But, as educators correctly keep reminding us, is the job of schools just to train worker drones? Besides, by understanding the algorithms of life, which can help students excel as humans, too, they can also be better at work and as citizens. It isn’t enough to be brilliant at Java or spreadsheeting. K-12 students need to understand how one human’s thoughts and actions can influence another’s, or multitudes’; that is what good fiction can provide, not turning us into saints but improving us as people in other ways.

In a similar vein, whether on books or anything else, I’d like the XO’s start up screen to have a button right next to the library icon. It would read simply, “Just me,” and turn off the chat features if they were enabled, among with other possible interruptions. Chat has its place, granted. The new BookGlutton service, for example, even lets you chat with people who have gotten only so far in a book, meaning that you’re reading the book together and can share the experience without knowing the ending ahead of time. I’d love the XO to borrow from BookGlutton. But please, let’s not overdo chat and Twitterize away an appreciation of books and other encouragers of sustained thought. Interactivity should work for reflection, as it could with BookGlutton if not overdone, rather than against it.

A few more words on why I see e-book potential galore in the XOl

Beyond the OLPC-introduced screen and the tablet mode, why I am so keen on the XO’s promise as an e-book reader? We can begin with some general philosophizing on the perfect e-book reader, which, coincidentally, happens to be the topic of an DearAuthor.com post made earlier today. I’d agree in most place with DA’s Jane. She wants easy buttons for turning the pages while holding the gizmo in once hand, and in fact, if you set up the XO the right way and are strong enough, you can do just that. The current machine is too heavy for young kids to hold it in the air while reading hour after hour. But you can rest it on your lap, or on the bed or whatever you’re reading on and comfortably press buttons to move from page to page. To reply to Mike Cane’s observations in the TeleRead comment area, yeah, I’m still a kid in good standing and at times read off my XO while on the floor, with the little green machine on my tummy and my head on a pillow against a closet door. I still wish the machine were lighter, though; it’s just so kid-suitable that children will go for it anyway. By the way, because of the “rest on” factor, perhaps older people with arthritis and hands too weak for holding books would like the machine, too. They could use a mouse wheel if need be for page-turning; yes the, XO works with a USB mouse (and speaking of USB, the XO has three USB ports, allowing you to use a mouse, an adult-sized keyboard and a memory key at the same time).

As for Jane’s demand for a backlight, the XO easily meets that criterion, and, in the bargain, offers E Ink-style features for bright sunlight. A go-to-page button, as well as one for finding, part of her criteria, would also be nice. So what about her other first-listed requests, for “a 6-8-inch screen, WiFi components, Bluetooth, SD slot, solid state batteries, user replaceable battery”?

Why, Jane, the XO already has them except for Bluetooth, hardly a “must” for schoolchildren, and the batteries (wait: I do see that the batteries are user-replaceable and are based on lithium ferro phosphate technology). Shrink the size and weight of the present machine, maybe provide long page-changing controls, like the Kindle but without the hair-trigger problem. Jane also offers other suggestions, and I myself would like to see an improved touchpad, maybe even a second one, accessible when the folded into the e-reader mode. Or how about a pen interface if the economics allow (with string or another measure to prevent the stylus from being lost)? All in all, however, the XO is most of the way there. Imagine what the XO would be like with e-reading software carefully integrated with the software. In e-book software terms, the XO team has barely scratched the surface. Remember, I’m making the case for the XO’s potential, not saying it’s perfect now.

Opera and FBReader: Making the XO still better as an e-reader, at least for older students and adults

Two programs, however, Opera Web browser and FBReader, will let you turn the XO into a much more powerful and flexible e-reader despite FBR’s own rough spots of the moment such as unreliable page numbering (one work-around: search-based identification of places for students to go). In this post I’ll provide information to help you install these programs and use a memory card that will let the XO store literally thousands of books and other content—everything from public domain books in the new .epub format to converted PDFs of free books available through the ad-supported Wowio service.

Opera is helpful since it simplifies the downloading of files onto a card for FBReader. The current browser works with the Evince-based program for reading PDFs—Evince isn’t running with .txt and HTML, as best I can tell—and more or less hides file-related processes from the typical user.

Also you can’t see bookmarks presented in as logical way as Opera’s. For younger kids, perhaps the existing software will do. But for older students and adults, Opera and FBReader can vastly improve the reading experience. I’ll even show you how to use FBReader to customize the buttons on your XO—not just for changing pages but for getting to the end or start of a file or for altering the size of the type, just to mention a few options available through the program.

For a little background on Opera installation, check out already-published instructions from the OLPC News forums. Once Opera is installed, you’ll be able to click on a link to an e-book file, from a good source such as Feedbooks (source of classics and public domain books in .epub format, among others), Manybooks.net (another multiformat site where, I’d hope, .epub will eventually appear) or Project Gutenberg (notable for the quantity of books—22,000+ claimed titles at this point). You can tell Opera to write to just the right directory on your memory card. You can install Opera as a full-fledged “Activity,” meaning that you can fire it up from the low menu at the bottom of the starter screen, rather than having to go into the old-fashioned “terminal” mode and type out a command. Or if you want—and this is simpler to do—you can set up Opera to run from the command line.

Some installation details

But what are the specifics of getting FBReader going on the XO—ideally after having checked out the OLPC Support FAQ? Here’s the basic stuff to type in:

1. Control-alt-F2. The fourth key from the left at the top of the keyboard is F2. If you see a log-in, type root.

2. The letters su once you’re at the command prompt. Make sure they’re in lower case since linux cares about such details.

3. rpm -i http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/updates/7/i386/fbreader-0.8.8-2.fc7.i386.rpm

The third item is all one line with a space between the -i and the http. Big thanks to Bennett Todd for the above information. (He was the first person known to me, at least, to get FBReader going on the XO. I may or may not have been the second.)

(Update, Jan. 23: The above link no longer works. Go here for more recent into. - D.R.)

Fire up FBReader by typing just that—large FBR and small eader—on the command line.

In the future you can reach the command line via the terminal mode found within the Activities Menu. It’s probably the fourth or fifth item from the right of the activities menu, and you can reach it by clicking on the right arrow. The terminal icon is rectangular and contains $_. I probably could just as well have used the icon in my installation; I’m just telling you what I did. Another tip is to use the tap key to get into the command area after you’ve see the terminal screen come up.

4. Once within FB Reader, the basic commands are a cinch. The book icon on the left of my version of FBReader shows authors, and then you can click on the + and - signs to see titles associated with the writers. The next icon shows recently read books. Mouse over the rest of the icons and they’ll be self-explanatory. Text search shows a magnifying grass. For adding books, you can use what might be the third icon from the right—a stack of books with the + sign. It will ask you what directory the books are in. A memory card or a USB key is a great way to get around the the complexities of linux paths. More on this later. The quit command is ctrl-q. By clicking on an icon showing some tools, you’ll reach the customiation menu.

For more on FBReader for the XO, see the TeleRead site here and here, as well as discussion on the OLPC News bulletin board. For some generic FBReader tips, including how to map page-changing and other FBReader commands to appropriate buttons and keys, see Ten easy tips for e-book users who want to switch to a Linux handheld, in the TeleRead area. A PDF version is available for making printouts. The same basic concepts, including key-mapping commands, apply to the XO as to the Nokia handhelds. For further information, see N800 as an EBook Reader Using FBReader, in Every Flavour Beans.

Key-mapping and other important customizations

Since this post is XO-oriented, let me discuss customizations of interest for this machine. Here is the key mapping I’m using, with the XO serving as a tablet and the screen folded so the little peephole for the videocam is at the top, a bit to the left:

• Top arrow of multi-button-diamond: Increase font size.
• Lower arrow: Decrease font.
• Left arrow: Go to start of file.
• Right arrow: Go to end.

But how to move from page to page? Use the big button on the bottom of the XO as folded into a tablet. My button assignments are:

• Top arrow: Page back.
• Low arrow: Page ahead.
• Left arrow: Page back.
• Right arrow: Page ahead. That’s the one I’m constantly pressing.

Use the small button on the lower right to change the orientation of the page.

And now for some other ergonomic advice: Stick your pinky or other finger in the lower bottom hole on the hand and then experiment with other some fingers in the long hole that normally serves as a handle. Again, as noted earlier, the XO, is too heavy for a young student to hold hour after hour without its resting on something. But the ingenious handle/grip still makes things easier. For moving around within the menus, I use a USB mouse so I don’t have to revert to the laptop mode as often. Ideally someday, of course, the FBReader will have a virtual keyboard and, gasp, a touch screen so you can easily do searches in the tablet mode. But as it is, you can do plenty. The incredible screen quality for the price—the displays cost just $35 to make—is worth the tradeoffs.

Within the customization menus, reachable by clicking on the tool icon, probably second from the right, here are a few settings of interest, once you’re got the basics taken care of. I’ll start at the the left.

• Language: English, Unicode and UTF8. No prejudice against other languages; I’m just passing on tips for the language I use. These seem to work with tricky files such as Mobipocket conversions from PDF, made possible through Mobi Desktop (no Mac or linux versions, alas). Here’s why I’m bothering you with this detail. I’m using my XO to read converted Wowio PDFs of various novels by Kurt Vonnegut, William Styron and others, and you can also enjoy a wide range of nonfiction as well as graphic novels of the very kind that young people could go for. While Wowio is ad supported, its offerings are junk not. You can even find a Mencken biography published by Oxford University Press. More relevantly, the children’s area is here and is organized by subject, age or reader and publisher. Frances Hodgson’s The Secret Gardem, Ed Hanson’s Sunken Treasure, Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Jemina Puddle Duck—those are some of the titles. Yes, some of these books are in the public domain. But Wowio has added value through the use of color. Take your pick. As for the ads, I’d prefer there not be any in kids’ books, but actually Wowio has been moving toward the sponsorship model, with just a mention or so at the start of the book and maybe an ad or so later on; this is a far cry from the obnoxious Channel One News. Sadly, for copyright-related reasons, the WOWIO service so far is available just within the United States.
• Scrolling: Choose Options for Large Scrollings and set the delay for 0. Within Scrolling Mode, choose Scroll Percentage and set it for 100 percent. Within the Options menu, also set the mouse scrolling for 100 percent. This way, you’ll be able to use your mouse wheel to change pages. So you can leave the propped up somewhere, without even holding it, and not even bother with the page changing buttons if you’d like.
• Margins: Left and right: both 40. Top and bottom: both 15. Merely my choices. Come up with your own.
• Format: Just mess right now with options or Base. I chose a line spacing of 2 and left justification. Line spacing is one of the rough spots of FBReader. With most fonts, you may actually need 2, the maximum spacing, to do single spacing properly.
• Style: I stuck with the Base option and used the KacstDigital family of fonts at size 10. I switched on the bold option for better screen contrast, especially when the XO is in the reflective mode. I avoided Italic but choose Auto Hyphenation.
• Indicator: That’s the bar at the bottom of the screen—showing your progress in the book. I used a height of 16, an off set of three and switched on the numbers option. I also choise Switch TOC Marks and Enable Navigation. I did not choose time, thereby eliminating one more distraction from my book-reading.
• Rotation: I kept it disabled since the XO can rotate the view on its own, thank you very much. But if you want the menu bar to appear in a certain position, then, yes, experiment with a mix of the XO and FBR rotation options.
• Colors: I didn’t change anything.
• Keys: See the Nokia-related references on key changing—the concepts are the same. This procedure really isn’t that tricky. Start by typing in the key you want to change, and then you’ll see a variety of options—everything from bringing up the XO’s library to assigning keys for paging. Remember, you can use keys on the keyboard itself. Cntrl-L can bring up the library, for example.
• Config: Set it up to save automatically every 30 seconds.
• Web: Allows you to open external links in your browser. So far I haven’t gotten that one to work.

Memory cards

The OLPC wiki has some handy tips on the use of memory cards, which I prefer to the constant use of a USB key, since I fear it could break off. But a key can be handy for transferring files to your memory key if your card won’t work with your desktop or card reader. (Get into the terminal made via the ctrl-alt-F2 routine and type su if in the system later on won’t let you do the copying you want.)

Then use this command within the directory from which you’re copying files:

cp -R * /destination/directory/.

Your key and/or memory card can be found within the /media directory.

Source of books

But what about sources of books, beyond those mentioned? With FBReader, you can be up and running with any online library that offers text in popular noproprietary formats such as ASCII. Here’s a list from Fried Beef and another from Librarian Chick. I could write another 5,000 words on content issues and the gaps online—just a fraction of the world’s books have been digitized—but here, the focus is on the machine and the software rather than the content readable on an XO.

If you’re interested in content issues, catch up with me about LibraryCity.org. I don’t think there should be just an OLPC library per se. Here’s to a multi-platform approach that’s OLPC-friendly!

Final thoughts

OK, I recognize this isn’t everything about the XO as an e-book reader, but as you’ll notice, I see lots of promise here and am more than a little POed at the Economist for trashing the XO and neglecting the machine’s possibilities for E. Meanwhile I hope my specifics help existing XO users. I’ll welcome additions and corrections.

Related: OLPC’ staffer’s comments on the issue of the Windows XP for the XO and a rebuttal to the Economist’s Clunky Laptop article. For more on Mary Lou Jepsen, see Former OLPC CTO: $75 laptop will run Linux and maybe Windows. I really like her eagerness to offer laptops that aren’t just “Dells on a diet” and even go beyond the current XO.

Tip: Try to wait for the XO to boot up fully before using the touch pad controlling the cusor. Otherwise it won’t reflect your movements as accurate as it should. I wonder if the Economist reviewer was unaware of this factor.

Help wanted: Robert Nagle and I are planning an FBReader wiki for TeleRead.org, with the blessing of FBR’s main developer, and we’ll welcome volunteers. Yes, I want a special XO section.

(Revised on January 14, 2007, on include information on OLPC America.)

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