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

[Samuel Klein]

This is brilliant.  thank you, rebecca!   --SJ



On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 3:56 PM, Rebecca Hargrave Malamud
<webchick at invisible.net> wrote:
> 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
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