Redesigning: Library, Read, Get-Books, and Content bundles

[Reuben K. Caron]

There has been a lot of great progress with the Read and Get-Books  
(IA) activities. However, we have neglected to think about how we can  
better fit all of these pieces together. For instance, consider  
deployments that would like to install content bundles. They package  
these files into .xol packages and these packages get installed into  
the "Library," which is contained on the left hand side of the Browse  
activity. Yes, you read that correctly..."the BROWSE activity," an  
activity intended for online exploration is used to view offline  
content. Every deployment that I have shown this to has found it very  
unintuitive. Consider another example: You want to use Get-Books to  
get a new book. So you open Get-Books search for a book and download  
the book. But where did it go? I guess one could assume (correctly)  
that it went to the journal. So you close Get-Books. Go to the  
Journal. Find the book you downloaded. Open the book (in Read.) IMHO,  
a series of needless steps.

So what if we created a "Library Activity"
The activity would:
-Open a book from within the activity
-Highlight and annotate books
-List all of the books you have downloaded
-Allow you to search and download additional books from Feed Books,  
Internet Archive, the XS, etc..
-List the resources in /home/olpc/Library (so this can be removed from  
Browse)
-Allow one to synchronously or asynchronously share a book to their  
Neighborhood so anyone can download and read it.

I have filed a bug here if anyone would like to follow it: http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/2110

I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Regards,

Reuben