Is One Laptop per Child dissing e-book-lovers—and the kids whom e-books could help educate?
Not deliberately.
The linux-powered XO—aka, the $100 laptop, nicknamed in honor of the price we hope it’ll reach someday—has a low-powered e-book mode with an E Ink-sharp display.
E-book software disaster right now
But in software terms, the machine is currently a disaster for e-book fans with XOs. And yes, they exist—already, as indicated by a thread on the unofficial OLPC News‘s instantly busy forum.
What’s more, with the right software, the rugged XO could be a terrific machine for book-lovin’ library patrons, including those who could benefit from its large-“print” potential.
PDF hell
The problem is that Read, the current document viewer, shown in the screen shot, is apparently now working only with PDF. My XO has yet to arrive, despite my being a first-day donor, but based on prior experiences, I can’t tell you how much I hate PDF on small-screened machines.
An OLPC Wiki user named Tom Hannen has noted that Read is a memory hog and currently won’t even work with .txt, HTML or .djvu (not that the latter is the best for small-screened machines, either). A TeleRead community participant also has had problems, speed issues. They won’t be so much evident on short files. But on book-length ones? Definitely.
FBReader to the rescue, please
Could FBReader, which reads .txt, HTML and .epub, the new standard of the e-book industry, be a solution while we wait for OLPC to get its software act together—and maybe even after that?
I recognize that the main users of the XO will be children in developing countries, but many students in K-12 there might be willing to take time to learn FBReader (not that hard!). Aren’t the kids supposed to be able to use the XO to master basic programming? So why not include or make it easy to add an e-book reader such as FBReader?
Needed: Volunteer(s) to adapt FBReader for the XO
From what I hear, an adaptation of FRBreader for the XO wouldn’t be that much of a challenge for the knowledgeable. Here are the issues:
- Operating system and other software basics. Linux. Gnome based. No prob.
- Processor. AMD Geode. Fine.
- Relevant info on package management. It could be, er, more generous.
- Software Developer’s Kit. Reportedly an SDK of sorts is available.
Can someone, an OLPC volunteer or the organization’s staff people, kindly step in to help get FBReader going? Bob DuCharme, an XML guy who’s been following this issue, has observed on an FBReader list: “This would really help to raise FBReader’s profile, and help a lot of kids besides.”
Opera
The FBReader isn’t the only piece of software that might speed up people’s XO experiences. How about the slim Opera browser? People are begging for it. And, yes, you theoretically can install it. But the warning from the OLPC Wiki is that installation is only for “a Linux power-user. Otherwise, it is, for all practical purposes, simply impossible.”
Detail: E-book-reading software like FBReader is much better than existing browsers for displaying books. FBReader has true paging, as well as a wide variety of typographical options.
Related: A proud XO owner’s collection of pictures of his new baby.
Typing two commands into a shell prompt does not strike me as “simply impossible”. I concede that it might be difficult if the people trying to do it were part of the XO’s original target audience, but that’s not who we’re talking about here. I do agree that there should be an easier, GUI-oriented way to install it, but there’s really no call for this kind of anti-command-line techno-Luddite-ism. If you’re capable of typing in lines of text exactly as printed on a piece of paper, you’re capable of doing what the website indicates is necessary to install Opera. It’s not like you have to do it every time you want to run the application. Command lines are really not the rocket science that GUI proponents would have you believe they are.
For PDF on the XO: try the custom PDF feature on Feedbooks. You should get good looking results.
Delighted that option is available, Hadrien, but .epub would be much nicer. Plus, the PDF reader probably won’t as swift as FBReader. Thanks and happy holidays. David
Hadrien’s site (feedbooks) also creates epub’s as well as PDF. It is an important initiative.
It is doing something I believe will be the final stage of ebooks, marked up text, and a variety of stylesheets that produce the same ebook in different forms as required. Eventually I would like to see a new standard which includes verbose stylesheets capable of doing this – but that is an aside.
I have being trying to better understand .epub, interestingly the support for Daisy’s DTBook, which allows external modules to be included is most exciting – for me because it may be possible to integrate TEI (for serious academic works) into .epub.
FBReader needs some improvement, not least of which is proper page handling, but I agree in terms of XO it is a good choice at this time.
A better one would be to have an XML rendering engine (Mozzila’s gecko) and use this as the basis for a reader and a browser, (perhaps even a word processor).
Beyond firefox and its kin, there are some other promising approaches in development. But at the core should be a shared XML rendering engine, upon which other things are built – I have hopes for REBOL 3 as a means of sliming down the applications, sharing common resources, but that is a few years off yet.
“E-book-reading software like FBReader is much better than existing browsers for displaying books. FBReader has true paging, as well as a wide variety of typographical options.”
The win32 FBReader I have installed has no contents listing or proper pagation. If these things are fixed it makes it a great choice. Is there a beta, that I have not got, or have I missed the obvious?
Hi, Greg. When I meant true paging, I meant separate pages rather than simply scrolling. At least some versions of FBReader do have gaps in them–which are on the fix list. So thanks for pointing this out to help people get the full picture. That said, the experience of reading with FBReader on a small screen will be vastly superior to reading with PDF unless PDF files are specifically prepared. I’d rather that users not have to go through those hassles.
Slightly related–in the XO sense: Good news: my order is in the system and there’s still a chance I’ll get the XO in the next few days. I was a first-day donor.
Thanks and happy holidays,
David
David, I am pleased, very pleased to hear that true paging is possible, especially as in the next two weeks I expect to get my iliad and I believe FBReader can be installed.
I hate scrolling with a passion, I swear I spend more time looking for the last sentence read than I do reading any new ones.
PDF as it now stands cannot work, though Feedbook’s pdf on demand goes a good deal of the way in showing what should be done (non-dynamic flow, specific purpose pdf, made to order on the user’s machine via XML tagged text is my ideal).
I think from another article the XO might find PDF rendering a bit processing intense (might be because it is rendering big pages – when you get the machine, it would be nice to find out). Feedbooks could supply a nice trial – an A4 compared to a much smaller pdf, compared to simple text or something similar.
Have a happy Christmas break.
Thanks, Greg. I’d encourage you to keep kicking the tires on FBReader and report its flaws—ideally in versions beyond the windows one. I feel about FBReader the same as about .epub. I like them both, but they’ll never get better if people don’t look for weaknesses. Let’s find out all the loopholes when it comes to “true paging” and the rest.
As for PDF on the XO, I can’t wait to see how digestible the Feedbooks’ variety is.
The iLiad? Almost surely the best e-reader for you—not just because of the screen but also because you can run your own programs. As noted, I already have FBReader running on it. The big issue is the refresh rate, along with the hassles to using something as poky as today’s E Ink to make changes within menus.
Meanwhile the happiest of holidays to you and your family (Hanukkah in my case, XMAS for Carly)!
Cheers,
David