User:Sj/books

Jan 24

Notes on the recent work on the OLPC books initiatives:

Ed and I met this week to discuss the year's plans for online and offline book use. We have unified support for the IA project from the open library, textbookrevolution, ck12. I've gotten a designer and programmer working on a custom gnubook interface for the XO, we have community testing of gnubook on XO and filed related feature requests, and we are working out initial timelines with BK & Raj Kumar.

IA has agreed to set up accounts for students and teachers to upload their own collections of books (including those they have made themselves), and can scan these in. Calling all teachers with scannable class projects...

IA are also supporting a new Guatemalan scan center, which I connected with the OLPC community there, and with the Peruvian national library. They aren't large, but eager to grow, and Jameson knows people who could help as volunteer scanners...

the million book project

They have a good collection.

What it needs : booklist sharing, a better bookreader, offline options, localization.

The current XO Book Project has

1. an Open Library curator at work on statistics and a sample collection
2. two programmers working on the bookreader: Anand & Raj (from IA) with help frmo Sayamindu (from OLPC)
3. a shared mailing list and bugtracker for the reader
4. a tool for creating & sharing bookmarks ready for use next week.

We can announce this to teachers & librarians now to spur participation, and ask them to bookmark their own collections.

Some of these tools are being migrated from the IA to the Open Library, which is a fully localized platform.

We are working on three small announcements and one large one:

 * about the booklist creator, to spur participation from teachers to select interesting books (1-2 weeks)
 * about the bookreader, and the XO as a reading tool, once the next version is out (5 weeks?)
 * about the MBP being available offline - with tools to export bookshelves and a standalone reader 
 * an IA - OLPC  partnership to make books avail to children everywhere, with details about the collections, tools, and current users (schools).  

BK wants the last one to wait until the end of year. I think it should be ready by September (in time for the IA's annual Open Content Alliance meeting and the Fall book fairs), and it would be good to announce our intended collaboration much sooner; that may even draw in more partners.

Future traectory

Optimize speed of our bookreaders

[proper allocation of sayamindu's time & requests for help]

update Read to handle djvu files (4x smaller files, 2x faster rendering)

improve wikireader speed : optimize javascript rendering in Browse and firefox

develop a standalone epub/txt/html bookreader for the XO from fbreader (3x faster than the browser)

Literacy

[mission, promotion of work with partners]

Define options for literacy focus with current partners (World Bank, ICDL, countries)

Target late spring for a literacy announcement, highlighting our work in Mongolia & elsewhere

Wikibook authoring

[testing, hands-on participation and use]

We have tested a good toolchain of book-creation tools that CK12 is developing. Their first

5 full wikitexts (over 100 chapters in all) will be done by late February. They are also devoting

editors to making wikibook versions of 5 public domain texts from the IA as a demonstration.

Target early spring for an announcement about ways for teachers to create wikibooks, with Wikimedia, CK12, and IA as examples.

Publishing books born digital : Raj wants to help promote this. Specifically, helping authors publish directly to the IA, and working with Peruvian and Nepali expat communities in SF to help them create new works... this could be great.

Discuss this with our schools, be a field partner in that effort.

Wikibook compilation and reading

[promotion, work with cjb]

Our offline wikireader is widely used, perhaps the most popular one around. Promote it and attract more developers.

Get Wikimedia to make automatic static dumps for our reader every month.

Improve rendering speed, on XOs and off. cf : Chris Ball & Wade Brainerd.

Books on demand - the Digital Interlibrary Loan

[coordination & campaign for participation]

The BPL provides scan-on-demand for any PD book in their collection, with a 1-week turnaround.

The IA will scan a box of books we ship to them, with a few-week turnaround.

Define a "digital books on demand" program, and provide every school with a catalog of works.

Even schools with sneakernet every 2 months can request a list of books and receive them by the following term.