Ebook collections

While OLPC is not publishing official collections of books or other materials, it would be a good idea for libraries, archives, and other repositories to be able to identify and broadcast selections from their collections that are suitable for use on the OLPC and by children around the world. This will help students, teachers and others find Ebooks they can enjoy.

Criteria for Inclusion

All eBooks are not automatically suitable for the OLPC collection. In order to be in the collection, books must meet ALL of the following criteria:

• No fee required to download a copy of the eBook and no limits on making additional copies or derivatives to distribute as desired.
• The book's content is suitable for school-age children. Many eBooks are written for adults so they will not meet this criteria unless there are educational support materials readily available. For instance William Shakespeare's plays or the Koran are written for adults, however there is a lot of material available to support the use of these books in education.
• The eBook is availble in one of the 3 supported eBook formats, namely Acrobat, HTML or XML. It is not sufficient for converters to exist. In order to be in the collection, the eBook must already be converted to one of the 4 formats. Note that OpenDocument is in XML and is therefore suitable.

  We are working to add DejaVU support to Read, the default document reader. In the meantime, please make PDFs available as well.

Mechanics of the Collection

The bulk of the eBooks in the collection will not be available on an OLPC website. Instead, the OLPC Collection consists of a set of links to books that are stored elsewhere. In some cases, this may be to an original repository, such as a Project Gutenberg mirror. In other cases it will be to a website set up to support OLPC.

Volunteers Needed

Obviously, there is a lot of work needed even just sorting through the vast number of books in English. But we also need books in many other languages, particularly Portuguese and Arabic at present. Note that some books may be suitable for use in other countries even though the book is in English, for instance some of the Audubon bird books found here in DJVU format: http://elibrary.unm.edu/sora/

NB: Evince has DJVU support, but it is not compiled into the latest versions of xbook, which is the package Read uses.

Other Ebook resources

• World Public Library