[Testing] Opportunity: book reader testing [was: Re: Books for the OLPC Book Reader Demonstration]

[Rebecca Hargrave Malamud]

Hello,

My name is Rebecca Malamud and I am a UI Designer and a member of the 
Open Library team.

I created a web demonstration that just launched this morning to 
browse book collections on the XO at:

http://openlibrary.org/olpc/bookreader

It is still in the early stages and is built on open source software 
using an embeddable AJAX reader ( 
http://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/bookreader ) and a software component 
known as Carousel which handles the scrollable functions for the 
books on the right.

I am specifically looking for ways to improve the navigation of 
collections. There are a few known bugs:

- a user cannot quickly scroll to the top and bottom of the collection
- a user cannot view multiple collections, and sub-collections, or 
filter book selections on a variable such as author or subject
- more books should be revealed in the collections carousel on screen rotate
- book titles should be truncated so they do not break into two lines 
(this interferes with the viewable area of the carousel)

Also, it does not quite work in tablet mode on the XO yet -this has 
dependencies on the GnuBook reader, which is being developed by other 
members of the Open Library team. We need it to:

- respond to the arrow keys when in tablet mode (book and collection 
navigation)
- the book should zoom to fit width in the book viewable area
- a two-page view on default is preferable to a single page view

We also created an OLPC bundle for the reading of books offline in 
OLPC.  It currently has 5 books and is not using high-res images to 
keep the overall file size small:

demo: http://openlibrary.org/static/olpc_bundle/openlibrary/
bundle:  http://openlibrary.org/static/olpc_bundle/openlibrary.xol

Any help you could provide in testing will make the end product 
better for users of the XO and Open Library. The primary focus is on 
GnuBook - which Mel Chua sent links to earlier this morning:

the docs      --->   http://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/bookreader
launchpad  --->   https://bugs.launchpad.net/gnubook/
on github    --->   http://github.com/openlibrary/bookreader/tree/master

The standalone version of GnuBook without the collection navigation is here:

http://openlibrary.org/static/olpc_bookreader/

I have yet to open a bug tracker for the collections demonstration, 
when I do I will let you know - but we do have mailing lists where 
you can send informal feedback to - I would recommend the ol-tech 
mailing list at 
http://mail.archive.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ol-tech

Best regards,

Rebecca Malamud