Sugar unusable as an e-book reader

[Greg Smith]

Hi James and David,

I want to track additions and improvements to the XOs eBook Reader on 
our Feature roadmap page.

I created a requirement called Better eBook Reader at:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Feature_roadmap#Better_eBook_reader

Can you update that with any additions or work we need to do? If you can 
separate it in to requirement (what we want to do) and specification 
(how we will do it) that will help.

You can also put your name down as an "owner" if you plan to work on it 
in the near future.

Any questions or comments welcome.

Thanks,

Greg S

> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 2
> Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2008 16:06:29 -0500
> From: James Simmons <jim.simmons at walgreens.com>
> Subject: Re: Sugar unusable as an e-book reader
> To: devel at lists.laptop.org
> Message-ID: <49062D55.1040508 at walgreens.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
> 
>   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
> 
> 
>