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."
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Doesn't the OLPC have a B&W passive mode on it's display... the first version did.
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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.
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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.
It's the thought that counts and all... (Score:1)
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and teach them all English...and get them glasses...and make sure they weren't too hungry
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Actually, the common story I'm aware of is that the children used a combination of Hindi words and others from their local dialects to describe things like the cursor, as they'd had no English instruction on computer terms.
Given that English is one of India's official languages - I find the opposite claim that you can take children with no English, some of whom would be used to a non-Roman alphabet, give them a computer, and collectively, they've spontaneously learned English - incredible, to say the least.
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Well remember, the OLPC is using a precursor to the PixelQi screen tech, so the display quality is probably surprisingly comparable to e-Ink (in black/white mode).
Re:One laptop (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Why respond seriously to such blatantly obvious trolls?
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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.
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When access is very limited, the best get in. Let's not consider those representative of the rest who maintain their hellholes of origin as perpetual disasters which are the reason the gifted who can afford it run for the West in the first place!
Once the floodgates open, we get a broader spectrum of immigrants including the very backward.
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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.
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If you reread my comment... I actually qualified my statement with "those who have had access to decent schools."
What I am suggesting is that the GGP's ignorant statement "can they even read?" was ignorant due to it's assumption that a third world country wouldn't benefit from this program because they must all be illiterate.
I suppose I should have mentioned that availability of a variety of reading materials has always led to increased literacy within a population where education and literacy is valued.
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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.
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I just love how we in developed nations assume that those in the 3rd world are stupid.
The nineteenth and early twentieth century American student was not stupid.
But only a fraction would have the opportunity to go on to high school or formal vocational training.
OLPC's original mission was outreach to the poorest of schools and the youngest and most isolated of children and their families.
There is no point to loading the XO with an enormous - essentially random - collection of books these kids and their pa
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I addressed the availability of "decent schools" in my post... and to suggest that providing access to a variety of reading material is pointless is just false.
I don't care how poor and isolated a person is, if there is a desire to learn, someone with the skill to teach, and books to be read, and time, then literacy will increase. And once literacy is established, the most important thing is access to a wealth of materials to read.
Years ago it was uncommon for even wealthy families to have access to more t
Aha! (Score:1)
This must be why the Internet Archive is almost two years behind on indexing archived files instead of the usual 6 months to one year.
So lets say... (Score:3, Funny)
I can read one book a day...
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I can read one book a day...
Dang Dude, that laptop and you are gonna be 48,000 years old when you finally need to upgrade.
XO Design question (Score:2)
I still wonder why they didn't build the first XO on the ARM architecture. I only researched via Wikipedia. What I found out was that the processor they used was based on the an old line of AMD (before the Athlon came out) x86 processors. AFAIR AMD x86 processors were inferior to Intel 486 processors.
So why use such an ancient design instead of a modern day ARM. It would have extended the battery life.
I think they now changed it to the ARM.
Is there anyone here on /. that can explain why they used the x86 on
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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 ver
MS? (Score:2)
If they got infested by MS as people claim, ARM is an excellent low power processor with one issue: It can't run Windows ;)
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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
LOC (Score:1, Offtopic)
what about off-color titles? (Score:2)
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Er... (Score:2)
Are these books mostly written in English? And the OLPC is mainly used in developing countries? I think I see a problem here...
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.
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True, but in this case they would have to be public-domain in the United States to be included, since it's a set of books being compiled by archive.org and the OLPC project, both of which have to respect US copyright law.
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Americans are perhaps the most mono-lingual nation in the world. Whenever I travel abroad I'm taken aback at how easily folks in other parts of the world speak multiple languages.
In fact there are more English-speakers in China than there are in the U.S. and Canada combined. Why? Because their kids study Chinese AND English - many of them take extra classes after regul
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They may decide to cut their losses when they realize the odds for getting the debts paid off.
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If Chinese is going to become more dominant, it'll probably be because China will already have replaced the US as the dominant economic and sociopolitical power...
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They could always use the great classic books written in Sudanese, Yemeni and Somalian, like.... well, you know, all those books.
Or they could learn English, like they do practically everywhere nowadays.
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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 pl
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]
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Hey, I bet with you, that my car, full of hard disks, is also faster than an ISP.
That pigeon thing is a straw-man. There are better ways to say that there are problems. Like mentioning, I don't know, perhaps...the actual average transfer rate!! (Including outages.)
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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.
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Maybe - the use case also expected is that the teacher creates a subnet and the kids net together using non-traditional agent / peer contacts, independent of the internet as well.
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Well, they could ship thumb drives - I hope they do, then. Otherwise, this is of limited value.
The OLPC discussions that were rife in /. in days past - before its falling out of favor - had LOTS of comments from people wanting to use these in remote areas.
For those cases, the internet just doesn't sound like the option that everyone is making it out to be.
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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.
The standard OPLC deployment includes a school server.
The model used for reference material such as Wikipedia, text books or this is to put the material on the school server. All the XOs in the area have fast wireless access and the school server has the hard drive space to store and serve all the data.
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Internet, I'd guess.
Good point. I suspect that putting them on a website and letting Google work its magic might address some - but definitely not all - of the problem. After all, the really interesting literature is often the stuff you didn't know about in the first place.
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I'm on the board of one project that's offering Internet access over HF radio
Dude.. I've done that before also, are you bouncing it off the ionosphere to get it there? what kind of modulation techniques are you using? phase shift keying or something else.? with the severe limitations you encounter with HF it's hard to get reliable connections over like 2400 baud. Even with the tiny download sizes of things in plaintext (and compression) 100kb files would still take ages.
Are they in English? (Score:1)
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!
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Are the books in English? Since the OLPC is being shipped to many countries where English is not the primary language, if they don't offer them in the local language, I doubt that this will be usefull. BTW, I'm from Uruguay, where all the students from public schools were given an XO. This is called Plan Ceibal.
I was going to ask the same thing (I'm from Uruguay too :) ).
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: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 ?
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From my understanding recaptcha's source material is the NYT archives.
E-books that treat the user with respect! (Score:3, Insightful)
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
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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_
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That's if the copyright is maintained. If it's just let lapse, or even affirmatively donated (forget the correct term) then the copyright can last for a lot shorter time period.
I've run across several works that I know were printed in the 60's or 70's at Gutenberg. (Also, anything first published outside the US is out of copyright in the US up until the US signed the Berne convention. E.g., Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.)
Note that I'm not talking about justice or fairness. Those concepts are just about or
Usability? (Score:2)
Yeah, that's cool you can say "it has 1,600,000 books" but how are they categorized? Is the interface for selecting and searching for books intuitive? If the laptops are targeted to a younger audience are the selected books at an appropriate reading level for the age? I mean, this is really only useful if they can create a really, really, good front end.
1.6M books (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
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Please do contribute works with pictures. (Score:2)
May I ask what you're doing what to remedy this? It seems to me that working to fix this is more productive than only complaining about it. Are there some technical people working on a specification so people can enjoy free books with pictures in free formats?
I sense you mean well, but I suggest you'd do better to convince people to help you improve the state of e-books by asking for assistance instead of te
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Generalizing here, but poor kids in the developing world are not read to on their mothers' laps. Nor are they sprawled on the carpet with the Sunday comics, or even watching Sesame Street. We in the developed world really
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http://www.crumbproducts.com/comics.html [crumbproducts.com]
Comic book version of Genesis. It has great reviews. It's being translated into Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, German, Finnish, Dutch
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As far as I pictures, this is not such a big issue. Glossy pictures are important in the third world especially now, because that is what kids and parents expect. They expect 4 color prints on paper. They expect Snow White to be the disney drawing. They expect binding to be neat and pages to cut. Furthermore the opportunity costs of parents creating such boo
If is for asking... (Score:2)
Probably the initial target should be focus (o at least, discriminate or categorize) on books for children, and preferably in spanish (as probably is the language of the countries where has been more widely deployed so far, they are pointing
Internet Access Assumed? (Score:2)
In that case, the XO needs an English teaching app (Score:2)
Assuming that many of the the books are in English, the OLCP should have an app which teaches English; one which assumes no prior knowledge.
Well as amazing as that sounds (Score:1)
If there really is 1 Laptop per child. AND there is at least 1 child from all 6809 known spoken languages (http://www.lsadc.org/info/pdf_files/howmany.pdf) That's just 2350 books. Gotta read the fine print.
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.
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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!
Putting those books ON the laptops? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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