Sugar unusable as an e-book reader

[S Page]

david at lang.hm wrote:

> opening the book in .html just produces a lot of errors becouse the book 
> is spread across lots of files, and the jurnal isolation mechanisms copy 
> the file being opened to a temporary directory, where all the links to the 
> other files don't work.

Note that you could have entered file:///media in Browse and located the 
HTML files; I believe the links to other files would then have worked OK 
but you'd have to wander around with the USB flash drive hanging out of 
your XO.

In an ideal world the book would be packaged as a single collection 
(.xol) file, so downloading it would unpack it in ~/Library and add it 
to the content navigation in the OLPC Library home page.  You could try 
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Creating_a_collection and 
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Content_bundle_making_script .

(I put Little-Brother.xol on USB, it showed up in Journal, I chose 
"Start" and this all happened and Browse displayed the e-book.)

In this ideal world the .xol container would gain traction as an e-book 
format and Bain, Project Gutenberg, and the other content repositories 
would offer books as .xol bundles.


HTML in Browse integrates cleanly with the library/home page, can use 
advanced CSS for attractive layout, takes you from a link to a document 
without the download-Journal-Read steps, avoids PDF's fundamental 
broken-ness rendering a paper page on a screen, has JavaScript to add 
interactivity and features like annotations, etc. etc.  It's the future. 
  But PDF is certainly an important legacy format.

Regards,
--
=S Page