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:Nice try, but one hard-core fail (Score:3, Interesting)
Doesn't the OLPC have a B&W passive mode on it's display... the first version did.
Re:Nice try, but one hard-core fail (Score:3, Interesting)
I have an XO-1, and the screen is frankly the most interesting part for me. The industrial design is very good, for its intended purpose, but I'm not really its intended purpose, so that is a bit of a mixed blessing; but the screen is, for the moment, simply unique among available devices.
What's the story? (Score:4, Interesting)
From TFA:
Kahle says the Internet Archive books will be available through the reading "activity" on the XO Laptop. (Software on the laptop is organized into groups called activities pertaining to different types of creative and educational projects.) In an upcoming version of the XO's basic software, the reading activity will also allow students to browse books from a variety of providers, Kahle says, including libraries and commercial publishers.
He drew an explicit contrast between these approach and the more closed and controlled e-book sales models being forwarded by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other distributors. But getting new, copyrighted books onto platforms that don't provide strict digital rights management protections is still a tricky business proposition--so for now, the book sharing arrangement between the Archive and OLPC is restricted to free, public-domain books.
While I'm all for this project - tell me again HOW those books are going to get to an OLPC-using kid's hands?
As other posters have pointed out - there's the issue of indexing this stuff properly.
And there's still distribution to think about.
http://idle.slashdot.org/story/09/09/10/0318203/Pigeon-Turns-Out-To-Be-Faster-Than-S-African-Net [slashdot.org]
You can contribute time to publish free e-books (Score:5, Interesting)
I cannot help but mention the Project Gutenberg [http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page] which provide e-books for free. This is achieved by the use of volunteers who may proofread a single page (or more) a day. Everyone one can participate. There are opportunities at all levels of difficulty for proof-reading, in many languages and on many topics.
Re:One laptop (Score:2, Interesting)
Good question. His ignorant comment and the fact that I didn't have any Mod points left me no choice?
I guess I just get tired of ignorant, raciest, bigoted, and hateful people and hope that maybe, just maybe, a reply will convince them to actually reconsider their beliefs.
And no... I am not holding my breath.
Re:Nice try, but one hard-core fail (Score:4, Interesting)
If you switch to Teapot's ubuntu release, there's a hotkey to drop down to high dpi B&W mode, even with backlight full on. It's pretty great.
I'm extremely pleased with mine running like this. FBreader(?) works very well for ebook duties. I wish the screen was available on other machines, it's really great tech.
I do like the keyboard tech as well, but it's not as standout as the screen, I think.
Re:One laptop (Score:3, Interesting)
Immigrants from some countries do typically perform above average in American universities, but generally only those from countries where the immigration distribution is skewed towards the better-educated upper-class of that country, as with those who come to the U.S. from India, China, and parts of Africa. In cases where we get a different socioeconomic skew, like with Mexican immigrants, the same patterns of overachievement aren't borne out.
Re:Er... (Score:3, Interesting)
Nay-Sayers (Score:3, Interesting)
so why are the astroturfers out en force for this story?
anyway, i say good on the olpc project for trying to bring knowledge to the poor, the underprivileged, the down-trodden, the economically abused and the politically silenced. i still hope that we will someday look back on this project and think that it was a major stepping stone in our journey towards human rights, education and dignity for all.
Re:You can contribute time to publish free e-books (Score:1, Interesting)
Just as an experiment I thought I'd see what they had for science fiction. I looked for Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Brunner and some others - all authors with many books that should be long out of copyright but surprisingly found nothing there.
If you know of any works of theirs that are definitely out of copyright, then submit them. As for science fiction, they have a whole bunch by famous authors.
Andre Norton
Poul Anderson
Robert Arthur
James Blish
Ben Bova
Marian Zimmer Bradley
John Campbell
Lester Del Rey
Philip K. Dick
Harold Goodwin
Harry Harrison
H. Beam Piper
Frederik Pohl
James H. Schmitz
Robert Silverberg
Clifford Simak
E.E. "Doc" Smith
Jules Verne
Kurt Vonnegut
H.G. Wells
All these and more at Project Gutenberg
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Science_Fiction_%28Bookshelf%29#A
Re:XO Design question (Score:3, Interesting)
The official reason why the ARM wasn't used was that none of the many available models had decent floating point when the OLPC project was started. Unfortunately, the Geode's floating point performance turned out to be less than what was hoped. Unofficially, I imagine that the fact that AMD was one of the four initial sponsors of the OLPC biased the choice towards their product, just like having Red Hat as one of the other sponsors led to the Fedora based software (in contrast to using some already stripped down Linux distribution).
Things have changed since 2005, including the decision by AMD to discontinue the Geode (which they had bought from National, who had bought the creator Cyrix). The decision to use the x86 compatible Via processors for the XO 1.5 greatly reduced the software effort, which is very important given their current limited staff.
I am a huge fan of the ARM (I think I was the first one in the world outside of Acorn itself to use this processor in a project) but back in 2005 my suggestion for OLPC was that they should do their own custom chip using two Leon 3 (Sparc) cores. I still think it would have been a good idea.