[OLPC library] Fwd: Open-source, cross-platform ePub reader

S Page info at skierpage.com
Tue Oct 21 03:38:25 EDT 2008


Samuel Klein wrote:

> We need a real text/book/image reader on the XO,

By "real", do you mean http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Book_reader_feature_set 
  , or are there other requirements/wishes?  I would be interested in 
reading them and figuring out what it takes to bring the features to 
Browse -- I'm confident they've been done as Firefox extensions.  Nearly 
everything in that Book_reader_feature_set is in Browse except 
"Annotations, preferably sharable via network"; do any of the other book 
readers support annotations?

>  one that can read a
> variety of formats including html, and that can work with archives of
> compressed works

laptop.org pages say compression is important, then they note JFFS2 does 
compression.  So does compression matter or is it the filesystem's job?
Just like Firefox, Browse handles gzipped content, but only if it 
negotiates content encoding with a separate web server.

>  (like wikibrowse).

WikiBrowse is indeed really cool.  Is it a separate web server that 
responds to URL requests from Browse (or other programs) by handing back 
pages?  It or another simple web server could do the aforementioned "You 
asked for bigpage.html, here's bigpage.html.gz".

Is your use case
* G1G1 users expecting their XO to be an eBook reader like the Kindle or 
Sony
* or country deployments trying to make textbooks available for the XO
?  Seems the latter is best met by converting materials to HTML then 
providing them as collections.

Thanks for any elucidation you can provide,
--
=S Page



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