WikiReaders

As part of the OLPC philosophy of providing the tools to manipulate and change their environment, our preferred text reader will be something that supports collaborative annotation and editing of books -- something we refer to as a wikibook reader rather than a traditional ebook reader.

This reader and editor should support

Viewing

• A comfortable way to read and page through long documents
• The ability to display formatted text, including images and tables; see the crossmark specifications for details.
• Support for viewing comments and annotations made on works, in a way not too far removed from the source of the notation; this could be through footnotes, endnotes, margin notation, or well-linked separate discussion pages
• Searching and ways to find content by sectional headers or tags
• Support for extended character alphabets

Optional

• Support for basic filtering; perhaps filtering a page to show only summaries or only material in one language.
• Support for user-customizable skins, per instance or even per book.
• The aiblity for users to build a customized portal for themselves that links into their favorite works.

Annotation

• A mechamism to comment on entries and sections, and on other comments, that shows up in some way for other readers of a document who choose to see annotations.
• User profiles to attribute annotations.
• The ability to export and import annotations associated with a given document.
• A way to synchronize annotations between mostly-offline clusters or meshes and a global web of online users and other such offline clusters.
• Statistics about annotations and user contributions.
• A way to deep-link to sections of longer documents, and to refer specifically to sections, pages, and annotations of long texts.
• Support for a constellation of categories, labels, and cross-references.

Editing

• Support for text, photos, and other media included in a textual work.
• A tool to create a snapshot of a set of pages and take them offline; or to send such a request upstream for machines that are never directly online.
• A way to package a set of pages into a package that can be synchronized between online and offline wikis, which preserves metadata about edits and automatically merges changes/updates where possible.

Optional

• Support for synchronization across multiple wiki backends
• Support for edits and updates via email
• Ways to group users and pages together by category, editors, or context, to improve on a global view of "recent changes"

Hosting

• A global host [or hosts] for a library of collected annotations.
• No special installation on client machines needed -- make a specialized client available, but have this information viewable for people connected to the Web through a standard browser (Firefox)
• Find methods and incentives for other collections of materials and creators to work together in a way that keeps all host sites in synch with one another's updates.