[sugar] eBook software

[Ian Bicking]

Stephen Thorne wrote:
> I'm wanting to work on the ebook capabilities of the laptop, and I've
> found two starting points:
> 
> There's this code written by John Resig, which seems to be a prototype
> of a web based ebook reader:
> http://dev.laptop.org/git.do?p=ebook-browser-reader;a=summary
> 
> There's the 'xbook' software, which is an evince viewer that is
> labelled "Read" and is distributed with 385. It is worth noting that
> this is a PDF viewer, not a general ebook reader.
> 
> Is there anyone else working on software for the laptop for the
> purpose of reading text?

There's the library itself, which is what you get as the home page when 
you open up the browser.  I believe this is all done just as static 
HTML, and I believe the UI is just transitional, it's not intended as 
the final implementation.  I'm not sure how that relates to 
ebook-browser-reader.  Huh.

Anyway, there definitely will be HTML content that should have a good 
reading experience, which implies something browser-based.  Though 
there's been discussion of whether the browser activity in particular 
should be the basis of that.  The line between browsing and reading 
extended works seems fuzzy to me; creating a distinction by having two 
activities would seem unfortunate.

Something that I think would be excellent is if the browser had UI 
specifically related to some of these link types: 
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/types.html#type-links -- these identify the 
position of a page in a book-like structure fairly well, I think, and 
having the browser actually pay attention to that should make it easier 
to translating a book into HTML.

I imagine better bookmarking of some sort would also be helpful -- 
ideally you'd be able to save your exact position so you can return to 
it.  The journal would save that position (once the journal is 
implemented), but regardless of that the browser has to be able to tell 
the journal the position and then be able to return to it later.


-- 
Ian Bicking | ianb at colorstudy.com | http://blog.ianbicking.org