Sugar unusable as an e-book reader
James Simmons
jim.simmons at walgreens.com
Mon Oct 27 17:06:29 EDT 2008
All,
As the author of Read Etexts I am grateful for all the mentions of my
Activity on this mailing list. To answer David Lang's question, being
able to read Gutenberg's plain text files without converting them IS the
feature. There are hundreds of thousands of books available in this
format, including some that would be very difficult to obtain at any
price (Richard Burton's 1001 Nights, a complete English translation of
the Mahabharata, old science fiction like Edison's Conquest of Mars, and
so much more). Plain text files can be easily resized for comfortable
viewing in either portrait or landscape mode, the font is easier on the
eyes than PDF fonts generally are, and eventually we'll have reliable
text to speech with karaoke highlighting that will read the books out
loud to you. I have read several books on the XO using my own Activity,
and other than the fact that it cannot remember the page you left off on
last time (which will be corrected in time) I find it quite useable.
I also wrote the View Slides Activity, which can be used to read comic
books, among other things.
The comments about Read being unuseable say more about the PDF format
than about the Activity. I think Read does about as well for viewing
PDFs as anything I've used, but looking at PDFs on a small screen is not
that great. When someone gives me a PDF I tend to print it out.
James Simmons
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
More information about the Devel
mailing list