DJVU

Why is DJVU important?

In regions where computers are scarce and there is little support for native scripts, DJVU allows existing paper books to be scanned and distributed as ebooks. Even handwritten books can be distributed this way. Tie this together with the OLPC chat application's support for SVG input and the GECKO support for displaying SVG graphics and it is concievable to distribute a computer with no font support and NO TEXT AT ALL in its user interface. Icons would substitute for text in the UI and handwriting would be a primary mode of input. Note that the OLPC has a wider than normal touchpad to be used as a handwriting input device.

Of course, this is a bootstrap scenario. Once the OLPC is deployed in this way, native language speakers will begin to work on fonts, and a keyboard layout to enable text use on the OLPC. This could take months or years to sort out, but in the meantime, the kids have an educational tool to use.

What is DJVU?

The main site for information on DJVU compression format for ebooks is here http://www.djvuzone.org/
Recently a good overview article was published on News Forge.

In a nutshell, DJVU was invented to solve this problem:

Conventional web formats such as JPEG, GIF, and PNG produce prohibitively large image files at decent resolution. As a result, Web site content developers have been largely unable to leverage existing printed materials.

DJVU is intended to be used with scanned images of book pages, either black & white or full color. It then compresses those scanned pages to produce very highly compressed files.

Given that the target countries for the OLPC have poorly developed computing infrastructures, scanning of existing printed documents into DJVU format may be the fastest way of making a wide variety of educational material and Ebooks available to the kids.

DJVU is supported by the Evince reader which is being used by the OLPC project.

If you want to contribute to the DJVU project in any way, here is the site: http://djvulibre.djvuzone.org/