Books

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Revision as of 16:54, 14 February 2008 by Jgay (talk | contribs) (put "light and matter" book into template)
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Books are a concept, a collection format, a way of organizing ideas; including ebooks, textbooks, picturebooks and others. There are many sources of Free books in the public domain, or under GFDL, various Creative Commons, and other licenses.

Books

Textbooks

Mathematics

To create an activity summary, add {{subst:Project-summary-pg|}} to a new page.


icon for read Read : "Light and Matter," Benjamin Crowell - Physics books and other resources edit
"Light and Matter" physics book series. Accessed from the browser. PDF download available. 
Maintainers:  ·  License: CC-BY-SA  ·  Mime types: html, .pdf 		Download v. · [[1] source]
Tested in: all (trac)
Translate: ·    

Key:

New activities should use the project-pre-summary template, including: 

prettyname - the display name for the activity, such as Comic Maker. 
description - a few sentences describing the activity and its audience
categories - any keywords that match your activity and its use.  
   see the activities grid for examples.
maintainers - people actively working on the activity, with links to 
   their userpages or ways to contact them.
image - title of an uploaded image that may make a suitable icon
port-notes - notes on other platforms and potential or in-progress ports
mimetypes - mime types that the activity can read and launch.
comments - general comments about development.
l10n-notes - comments about localization, including links for translating
   existing related projects.
license - the name of the license[s] your activity uses, with a link
   to its full text.
status - from 0 to 6.  0:idea, 1:stub, 2:immature, 3:active development,
   4:beta, 5:stable, 6:finishing touches

Testable projects should review the style guide and use the project-summary template, also including: 

simplename - a simple name for the activity: it should contain only lowercase 
   letters, numbers, hyphens, underscores.  Determines the name of some source files.
packagename - the name used for project bundles; it should not contain spaces.
   It can be the same as simplename (best option) or a CamelCase version of it 
   (some existing activities do this). 
license - the name of the license[s] your activity uses, with a link
   to its full text.
status - from 0 to 6.  0:idea, 1:stub, 2:immature, 3:active development,
   4:beta, 5:stable, 6:finishing touches
version - the version number of the latest build.
source-url - a raw url for the source repository .
builds - latest builds in which the activity has been tested.
l10n-url - url and title of a place to go to translate the activity.
   common options are {{pootle|xo_core}} and {{pootle|xo_bundled}}.

Calculus

Physics

Economics

Kerala

jgay has some

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Creative Commons

Lists & Collections



South Africa

see the 16 books recently released in 6 languages


childrens books online

  • World Public Library has made more than 1,000 eBooks freely available to the public specifically gathered for OLPC folks. Please visit to download the titles.

See also The OLPC literature page, with links to sites offering collections of free (Public Domain out-of-copyright) and commercial Ebooks in many languages. There are also specific book collections being developed by libraries and archives for OLPC (add your own!).

terminology and formats

An "ebook" is a book that is stored in a computer and read on a computer screen. We refer to digital books simply as "books" on the wiki. Books are data without a reader application. (This last point is stretched somewhat by recent versions of Adobe Acrobat's PDF reader which can handle embedded Javascript applications in a PDF document and for HTML files containing Javascript). But for the purposes of this page we should restrict ourselves to the simpler, pure data digital books. There will be a place for rich documents containing Javascript, but these are really applications with lots of data, not books as such.

Ebook Formats

Book formats should be compressed (to conserve space) and open. In particular, they must not be encumbered by patents, and must be inclusive - they should not favor any particular vendor.

DejaVU

The DJVU format was developed in order to provide a much higher level of compression for scanned paper books, than existing formats like JPEG and TIFF can provide.

PDF

The PDF format is a simplified form of the Postscript programming language that only includes the commands necessary to paint ink on the page. It is easy for end users to create PDFs with the Print function of a word processing or drawing application. There are extensive Free/Open Source libraries of functions for creating, editing, and otherwise modifying PDFS, and applications built from them. For example, libpoppler and the Poppler PDF Utilities. There are also several Free PDF display programs, including xpdf, kpdf, evince, gv, and ViewPDF.

HTML

Although not particularly designed as a book format, HTML is widely used for books. Most newer Project Gutenberg books are available as HTML. Both special purpose Ebook readers and web browsers can be used to access HTML Ebooks. The OLPC does include a web browser.

XML

XML is not a directly usable format, but rather a meta-format. XML alone is not a book format, but many modern formats that can be used for books are XML based, such as ODF, and the XHTML variant of HTML. Other XML based formats are DocBook, popular for computer manuals, or TEI, used in the Humanities. Modern web browsers can render XML directly, but to make such a display attractive some transform (expressed in CSS or XSLT) may be required.

OpenDocument

OpenDocument is a compressed format (zip-compressed XML) for documents, including books, presentations, and spreadsheets. Complex documents (with many images) can be sent as a single document (unlike HTML), yet it can flow in a display (unlike PDF). It is also editable. AbiWord runs on the OLPC and is capable of opening ODF files.

Greenstone

Greenstone is a monolithic format for document collections. A Greenstone library allows quick full-text search access to large collections, and is typically smaller than the full-text it contains, due to the compression scheme it uses. A Greenstone library can be both accessed via a web server or locally on a (read-only) disk. A complete Greenstone collection can be large, which makes it less useful, given the storage constraints of the OLPC.

FictionBook

"FictionBook is an XML format for storage of books where each element of the book is described by tags." Also known as fb2, it is supported by FBReader. In fact, the FBReader website lists other Ebook formats that are not listed here.

Book Readers

Evince

The Evince book reader is part of the OLPC project. Currently it supports DJVU, PDF, Postscript and DVI. The OLPC project will likely include only DJVU and PDF as well as an XML/HTML based format. The Read activity uses Evince to render, and has a modified UI targeted to kids.

Plucker

A popular book format for PalmOS devices. A reader for Linux/X11/GTK+ already exists in the plkr.org CVS codebase (and is distributed in the Plucker 1.8 source tarfile). It should run on OLPC machine's OS. Most Project Gutenberg books are already available in Plucker format at the URL 

http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/plucker/NUMBER/NUMBER

where NUMBER is the PG book number for that book. For instance, John Stuart Mill's autobiography is available from PG in Plucker format as http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/plucker/10378/10378.

FBReader

An open source Ebook reader supporting many formats (fb2, html, chm, plucker, Palmdoc, mobipocket, etc.). more about FBReader

OpenBerg

OpenBerg Reader is a multiformat book reader based on Mozilla technologies. It's far from complete but it can already display rich XML/HTML books and organize libraries. Livesearch is in the works, as well as Plucker compatibility. The project could use help.

OpenDocument Viewer

The ODF Fellowship's OpenDocument Viewer could be used as a reader for OpenDocument files. It is open source.


OLPC Features

There are some pages already discussing how book formats and book readers could be specially adapted to the OLPC:

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