Sugar unusable as an e-book reader

[david at lang.hm]

On Mon, 27 Oct 2008, Stephen Thorne wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 27, 2008 at 5:04 PM, Hal Murray <hmurray at megapathdsl.net> wrote:
>
>> ebooks are just the tip of the iceberg.  (and probably only the first
>> iceberg)
>>
>> Do you have a plan to translate all the existing pdf files into your new
>> wonderful format?
>>
>> Even if you came up with a new/wonderful ebook format, how are you going to
>> convince the world do jump on your bandwagon?
>>
>
> I find your comments a little confusing.
>
> Project Gutenberg publishes content in dozens of different formats. We
> already have Read Etexts which is a variant of the Read activity that can
> read the various formats.

project gutenberg is not the only source of books.

think of all the papers published by researchers. almost all of them (that 
are available at all) are available in .pdf format. a very small 
percentage of them are also available in text or html.

also, file sizes matter as well

for example, on the book I read tonight

Download Unzipped Files

EBookWise/REB1100/Rocket Format (333k)

Mobipocket/Palm/Kindle Format (401k)

Microsoft Reader Format (391k)

Sony Digital Reader Format (477k)

RTF Format (830k)
Download Zipped Files

HTML Format Zip (377k)

EBookWise/Rocket Format Zip (332k)

Mobipocket/Palm/Kindle Format Zip (355k)

Microsoft Reader Format Zip (373k)

Sony Digital Reader Format Zip (450k)

RTF Format Zip (303k)



size alone makes .rtf a very poor format. unfortunantly the pdf files I 
created from openoffice were of sizes similar to the .rtf file

you really do want compression of the text here.

> See: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Read_Etexts
>
> I would love to see more effort into integrating Read Etexts into the core
> Read activity. At the moment the activity is mostly unusable, various
> problems with it have been noted in this thread.

the page for read_etexts doesn't say what it does that makes it better 
than the default read (other than being able to read zip files and 
gutenberg formats)

David Lang
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