Internet Archive Puts 1.6M E-Books On OLPC Laptops 106
waderoush writes "Brewster Kahle of the San Francisco-based Internet Archive announced today that all 1.6 million books scanned and digitized by the Archive will be available for reading on XO laptops built by the Cambridge, MA-based One Laptop Per Child Foundation. The announcement came during a session on electronic books and electronic publishing at the Boston Book Festival. Kahle said the Archive has been collaborating with OLPC for a year to format the e-books for display on the XO laptops, some 750,000 of which are in use by children in developing countries."
Re:A YEAR (Score:3, Informative)
No... it takes a year to perform optical character recognition on 1.6 Million Books so that they they only require a few kilobytes to be transmitted and stored rather than several megabytes.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:XO Design question (Score:3, Informative)
You do realize that x86 is a processor instruction set... it has been used by Intel, AMD, Cyrix, and many others. It is the instruction set that was first created by Intel with the 8086 processor and based upon other large instruction sets that proceeded it.
I suspect that they chose and x86 processor because there wasn't an ARM processor that was powerful enough to meet their needs. Even today, there isn't an ARM processor that can match even low end x86 processors from Intel or AMD. They are however very low power and pack tremendous performance/watt. Coupled with a good GPU that can be used for things like video decoding, ARM systems are finally becoming competitive for general computing tasks.
There are a number of reasons that the XO didn't take off... few of them were due to hardware decisions. Actually, the XO had some amazing hardware for the time. Unfortunately XO created a market for people wanting small low power portable computers and the netbook craze was started, which caused a huge drop in the prices making the $150 XO seem less appealing. I suspect that if they had just slapped a slightly modified Ubuntu on there as soon as the hardware was ready and started marketing it, they would have had a winner. But they spent months perfecting it, while others developed products that would compete with the XO.
Of course, the XO was never intended to be a hardware platform; it was a hardware/software platform that shipped with its own ideology about how it's users would interact with the computer and each other. Essentially it was as much a research project as it was a product.
Re:Er... (Score:4, Informative)
Although there's not much that can be done about it due to copyright laws, the fact that they're restricted to public-domain books likely skews it even more: there's a lot of 20th-century and 21st-century African literature, for example, but much less from pre-1923.
Re:Are they in English? (Score:4, Informative)
Many are, though a good deal aren't. I don't see a way to browse their texts archive [archive.org] by language (am I missing something?), but you can search by specific language in the advanced search. I can't get them to add up to anything near 1.6 million, so presumably many aren't language-tagged.
But some rough figures:
400 - Swahili
Definitely a skewed distribution, but e.g. 17,000 texts in Spanish is quite a few, certainly more than most children can read!
Re:1.6M books (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What's the story? (Score:3, Informative)
tell me again HOW those books are going to get to an OLPC-using kid's hands?
The Internet.
The standard OLPC deployment model includes a school computer with an Internet connection of some sort. If necessary, via satellite. Not a fast connection, necessarily, but even at 256 kbps you can download a lot of books. Especially when downloading 24x7.
Re:You can contribute time to publish free e-books (Score:5, Informative)
In fact, the proofread is done by the Distributed Proofreaders: http://www.pgdp.net/c/ [pgdp.net]
BTW, I'd like to know what is done from all the human OCR from the Recaptcha project: http://recaptcha.net/ [recaptcha.net]
Any link to the digitized books ?
Re:Er... (Score:3, Informative)
Are these books mostly written in English? And the OLPC is mainly used in developing countries? I think I see a problem here...
In the part of the world I live in (Pacific Islands), even the least educated people speak 3 or more languages as a matter of course. Some speak 5 or 6 fluently. Visitors (and many long-term residents) are regularly the subject of ridicule because they can't learn to say more than 'hello' and 'thank you', even after months or years here.
My educated colleagues and friends have a remarkable ability to pick up language and - more importantly - to grasp the nuance of even the most abstruse language.
Geography plays a big role in this, but in many developing nations, poor infrastructure and lack of travel opportunities mean that there are often dozens of languages spoken within a given country. I can say from my own experience growing up in a bilingual milieu that if you've been speaking more than one language from birth, learning a new one is pretty much as easy as learning a new sport or the rules to a new card game.
Re:It's the thought that counts and all... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Nay-Sayers (Score:1, Informative)
Looks like you've been living in a fucking cave. OLPC is a Micro$oft product after Negroponte caved in. Just another vehicle to secure their product lock-in also in the very poorest of countries where Free Software would have the biggest impact. So any OLPC news you hear these days should make you very sad.
The greed! The arrogance! The pure evil!