Sugar unusable as an e-book reader

[James Simmons]

Greg,

I have never worked on the core Read activity.  From what I have seen of 
it, I would say that you would have to modify evince so that it could 
support more formats, notably plain text files and .cbr files (which are 
archive files containing sequentially named images).  If it did that the 
need for my two Activities would vanish.  I believe that evince can 
already support comic books in the .cbr format if you compile in 
optional support for it.  Of course evince is not an OLPC project, and 
that will limit what can be done with it.

Some of the problems you mention in your entry are actually issues with 
the Journal (not remembering page numbers and making unnecessary copies 
of files).  I think others are working on improving the Journal 
datastore, which should help a lot of Activities.

Document sharing is not reliable with Read (or Read Etexts either).

Text to Speech in Read Etexts needs additional software to be installed 
on the XO to work.  Someone was working on this a few months ago.

As I said on my page for my Activities, I see them as only stopgaps 
until the XO has a better Read activity that supports more formats.  I 
don't feel qualified to work on Read itself.

James Simmons

>Subject: Re: Sugar unusable as an e-book reader
>To: devel at lists.laptop.org
>Message-ID: <49071544.6030007 at laptop.org>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
>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
>  
>