Ebook collections

It would be a good idea for the OLPC to publish an official collection of eBooks suitable for use on the OLPC. This will help teachers, and others, to find eBooks that they can use in their schools.

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 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 4 supported eBook formats, namely DejaVU, Acrobat, HTML or XML. It is not sufficient that converters 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 therefore is suitable.

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/