Internet Archive Puts 1.6M E-Books On OLPC Laptops

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:One laptop

[jhfry]

I just love how we in developed nations assume that those in the 3rd world are stupid. Actually, those who have had access to decent schools are quite likely smarter than you simply due to motivation. This has been proven time after time as students from developing nations visit our Universities and as a whole out perform our students by a tremendous margin, even with the cultural, language, and social barriers that they must overcome.

1.6M books

[rawket.scientist]

And how many of these books are in Spanish? Or French, or Farsi, or what have you? And with pictures?

I used to work in a small, poor town in the developing world. My community had a library with about 10 linear feet of shelving. All the books were in Spanish, but . . .

None of them had pictures.
The "local interest" titles were these impenetrable desk-breakers of 19th century poetry by some aristocrat from the big city.
There were only two or three fiction titles. Dante's Inferno counts, right?

I never once saw a child pick a book off that shelf, not even after an hour's wait while Mom ran an errand. There was nothing there that would appeal to a beginning reader. Hell, given the historical literacy handicaps in the region, those titles would have defeated most of the adults I knew.

If you want to encourage literacy (in the developing world or elsewhere) you've got to start small. Pictures. Rhymes and silly sounds. It takes years to get most kids up to chapter book readiness. Canterbury Tales ain't where you start!

Re:One laptop

[DNS-and-BIND]

Nah, it's a flawed comparison from a self-selecting sample. You never see the kids that drop out or are too stupid to do anything but become the local witch-burner. By definition, you only see the talented ones.

Assuming other cultures are stupid is quite natural - just look at how developed urban populations despise rural people. The disgust is quite open and appears in the popular media daily.

E-books that treat the user with respect!

[jbn-o]

And Project Gutenberg's e-books treat the reader with respect: no DRM, no special format hassles, wide availability, sharing-friendly (no need to fear what happens on copying, loaning, or selling your copy at a yard sale), easy to annotate, readable on every device, and available gratis (but worth money).

Many thanks to Project Gutenberg for all their hard work. Project Gutenberg sets a great example the public should keep in mind when commercial outfits offer significantly less for considerable forfeiture of your freedom and money.

Putting those books ON the laptops?

[Arancaytar]

Misleading headline. Even after character recognition and heavy compression, 1.6 million books are going to come out at more than 200k per book. That's .2 million MB, or 200 GB. On a normal laptop with a rotating 2.5" drive, that'd be infeasible.

The OLPC has no rotating drives [laptop.org], but rather a 1GB solid-state chip. (Which makes sense, reducing temperature, energy usage as well as shock sensitivity.)

So they probably mean they'll be bundling some software for reading it online.