EBook Reader (was Re: [PATCH] RFC: ReadActivity fullscreen, paging changes)

[Klaus Weidner]

On Sun, Jan 27, 2008 at 01:50:10PM +0100, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> On Jan 27, 2008, at 11:09 , Klaus Weidner wrote:
> >
> > I've now read the old thread, and I think there's some confusion  
> > between
> > a "page" being a screenful versus being the paper sheet to which I've
> > contributed, sorry.
> 
> Wouldn't a "real" EBook reader be much more useful than displaying  
> PDFs? You know, one that reflows pages automatically, where I can  
> adjust font size etc. Is this planned or even in existence already?

I think these are two quite independent areas, and it would of course be
useful to have good support for reflowable books. The evince-based reader
appears fundamentally designed to work with non-reflowable pre-laid-out
text, and changing that would be difficult. 

Instead of having a completely separate application, would it make sense
to enhance the "Browse" functionality to work with e-books? Converters to
HTML should be available for most common formats. In order to be a nice
book reader, it would be good to have more features such as better
table-of-contents handling and bookmarks that remember the position in
the document, and both of these would also be useful for web pages. It's
a blurry line between a web page being read offline and an e-book,
especially for the XO's intended use for kids who are likely to have
spotty Internet access.

I'm using the Scrapbook extension for Firefox a lot
(https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/427), and I think
something along those lines would work fairly well for reflowable
e-books. Clicking a link to an e-book file would convert it to HTML on
the fly, storing it in the scrapbook, where it would remain available for
later reading.

-Klaus