Slashdot Mirror
Low Tech Gutenberg?
Peace Corps Guy asks: "I have a friend who recently left for a two year Peace Corps stint in Mozambique. While there she has limited access to electricity, no technology, and not a lot to do with her 'off' time. She's a big literature fan, and many of us here at home would like to send a care package - but how best to ship pieces of free online text like Project Gutenberg to a developing nation? We can print it (high shipping and printing costs), print it very small and ship her a high quality fresnel lens (awkward), or put it all on a cheap PDA, which would be a high theft risk en route and in situ. High shipping costs on weight and volume are another major limiting factor. What alternative solutions can Slashdot readers suggest for shipping a freely available byte-stream to someone without a computer?"
You've got the right idea, but let me build on it. A relatively new development you may not have heard of has been created by some industrious Germans several centuries ago. This new method of presenting byte-streams is highly affordable, portable, and contains an embedded reader which does not require an external source of energy. While the initial selection of material was limited, I understand that the idea of the Gutenburg press has taken off to some extent in the following centuries, meaning that you should be able to ship any number of Dungeons and Dragons paperbacks to your friend.
the country has internet therefore there is probably an internet shop in the capital city. i would find one and pay them to print out the material and then have it shiped from there.
If she already has a PDA, or can get one, then the best way would be to send data via SD media.
As for powering the PDA, there are a number of options using solar power
But what the heck. I'd send it as a PDA with a huge storage card of some sort- but I'd disassemble the PDA first, send it in a few separate packages, marked "miscellaneous electronic parts" to avoid it being stolen, and to go for smaller packages thus minimizing shipping/customs costs. It can be reassembled at the other end. Plus, might be usefull to include something like This hand crank charger or This Solar charger considering that she has limited access to electricity. Far cheaper than shipping printout, books, or other items of the sort.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Find a decent text to speech software and make cds of the audio. They are small and light can be played in a cheap portable cd player. A cassettes would work also.
Here's a suggestion - there are many companies that offer to print such free online text onto smaller than letter-size paper, and they even bind it for you for much lower printing costs than doing it yourself. They call them "books".
These "books" aren't that much heavier to ship than high quality fresnel lens or PDAs.
Amazon delivers to Mozambique (linky). Just order some actual books and have them delivered. Some nice Penguin Classics paperback edition or so would probably be more practical to read than any of your ideas for delivering a Gutenberg text as well, I would think.
(Possibly giving this answer makes me a total moron because I obviously forgot about a number of problems with it, and it's not even an answer to the question. If so, kindly explain why it won't work. Ta)
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
If they already had a decent PDA it would be fairly easy to stash a memory card in something like a sock or normal book where it might not get noticed. As to getting the PDA there I have no clue.
Citoahc
My first thought was to go with an iPod mini, and just be sure to convert the pages to Notes format before sending it to her.
:\
The more I think about that though, you'd be better to send her something cheap that can read compact flash, then just mail exchange the compact flash...
Then PDA's come to mind.
Why not find a really old laptop with PCMCIA, load a minimal linux with a reader? That way if it were to be stolen, no big loss?
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
It saves the hassle, and it probably doesn't cost any more money.
i saw the baby, and the baby looked at me
You're talking about books that are off copyright, anyway -- buy some cheap or used paperbacks and send them as parcels. (I think there's even a discount books-only rate.) It's foolproof, familiar and when she's done, she can distribute or trade the books. A much better plan than microfiche and a Fresnel lens.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Why not ship the books? Perhaps, because an avid reader with alot of time on their hands can burn through your average trade paperback in a few hours. I also am familiar with shipping books internationally, since my wife used to use http://www.bookcrossing.com/ ship them all over the place. I quickly started questioning the practice when the shipping was close to the cost of the book.
So my guess is that they don't want or can't pay the few hundred dollars it would likely take to ship a large number of books to the reader and were wondering if the slashdot world had any clever solutions.
The Internet rises to the challenge!
x t
RFC 1149 'IP Over Avian Carriers'
http://klubkev.org/~ksulliva/rfc-april1/rfc1149.t
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
Project Gutenberg has some ebooks done by text-to-speech synths as well as those read by human readers which were donated by www.audiobooksforfree.com. A note about the final site mentioned: if you want their material for free, it requires you to sign up, download low-quality versions, etc. The rest comes at a price.
From there you can burn to a CD, easily playable in any $40 portable player. Heck, you could send 2 or 3 for the price of a PDA if theft concerns are that high.
If you want to send over a real reading experience and PDAs are risky to send and there are no computers, then I dunno how you're going to get around sending either the real thing or the text in microfiche or something along those lines.
Send it to her insured (normally costs 5% over the value of the package).
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Here's an idea. Open a website that allows people to donate books to this person, much like a paypal donation site. On top of you shipping books to your friend, other people can also ship off a couple old books that they don't want anymore.
It would save on shipping costs for you (I think what you're trying to do is ship a huge amount of printed material, right?), and wouldn't cost many other people very much either.
Anything that's on Gutenberg is probably something you can pick up in a 'thrift edition' at the bookstore for less than $10 if a short book and less than $15 or $20 if a long book.
At those prices, just buying the book is probably going to be a whole lot cheaper than printing the files yourself, and is going to be cheaper to ship as well (since the paper in pulp paperbacks tends to be lighter weight than printer paper.)
On top of that, the dimensions of real books are going to make them a lot easier for your friend to store and transport, and the covers are going to prevent as much wear and tear on the books. (I have lots of computer printouts of free books online. They don't last long, even though I just keep them on a desk.)
If you really really want to send a LOT of books, you can send a PDA, but that's also going to be expensive, and it's going to harm the ability of your friend to enjoy the books - she won't be able to read them just anywhere, because she would be attracting attention to herself, and in almost any country in the world foreigners with expensive crap are going to be more likely to be mugged. On top of that, you're going to have to send her a regular wall charger since she doesn't have a computer, and those things are bulky and annoying to carry around. And nobody likes a book that starts bitching about low batteries while you're reading it.
Do her a favor, don't bother being trendy or 'e', and just buy her some real books. Heck, maybe there's an online bookseller in Mozambique that sells lots of english-language books, so you can save even more on shipping costs.
Explain her part in detail in a letter you send beforehand.
At a mutually agreed upon time have a powerful laser flash against a satellite that will be passing overhead (for her) during the early evening. The flashes will encode the text in morse-code going slowly enough for her to read.
There are some practical details to work out, but this will work.
Or, of course, you could just send her a 10 cent paperback book from a used bookstore, but if that were practical you would have already thought of it and not asked Slashdot.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Use the right tool for the job.
OK, so others have already suggested this, but really, it's probably the best solution for many reasons. For example, when the person is done reading them, give the books away to locals to promote the stories. It's educational, and a great way to expose others to the literature. The problem with at PDA is that its the usefulness is really limited to that one person, but if you send books, they can be passed around to countless people. We take things like this for granted but many would love to get their hands on books to pass around...
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
Send her a handheld microfiche reader that runs off of 120VAV, 12VDC, or ambient light. Fiche-ify the books, voila!!
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
OK, how about printing each page onto movie film and setting her up with a projector that's modified to advance a frame at a time upon demand. I estimate you could send a few hundred books per reel, or a single book in a package the size of your fist.
Also known as microfiche.
Ship paper, not electronics. Don't ship small print either!
Your friend is supposed to be helping these people. When you ship an electronic book she reads it in her off time, and then what? Ship paper and she has something to leave behind as a gift when she leaves. (Note, there may be laws against this) Something that might encourage some of the natives to read for fun, which makes them better.
Prefer books printed on acid free paper. With lose pages from a printer you can count on one getting blown away in the wind and then what? (Note, you can bind your own books, something to look into though I don't know if it is worth it) Normal acid paper will be destroyed in a few years. These are people who will have enough trouble getting books, they don't need to have the few they have destroyed early.
Dear Slashdot: I want to send some reading material to a friend. It can either be on paper (books), or in electronic form (file). I can't send paper (too expensive) or anything that will read a file electronically (theft). Please help.
*rolls eyes*
I'm sure there is some wisdom to the idea of just sending books, but you might also consider checking out a program called FinePrint. FinePrint can print 2, 4, or 8 pages per sheet of paper and can also streamline the process of duplex printing (giving you up to 16 pages per sheet). I use it all the time just to save paper, but it might suit your purpose as well. I know that there are similar programs for processing text files under Unix, but I can't recall the name(s) at the moment.
You might also want to be aware of another good resource of free online books, The Online Books Page. It includes Gutenberg Project texts as well as lots of others.
Can they acquire an old laptop with a CD-ROM drive? Maybe something that can be recharged via solar power?
Someone else mentioned shipping things disassembled so they won't get stolen. Laptops are easier to reassembled than PDAs. Marking them as broken parts and REALLY pack the hard drive.
Better yet: make the CDs bootable so they don't even need a hard drive.
Is decent paper available locally? Ribbon or ink cartridges are small and weird enough to ship without being stolen. Send her a cheap old printer and an old PDA that can drive it. Since the printed books can be taken anywhere, the theft-targets can be left at an arbitrary secure location. This has the advantage of being able to print as many copies as resources and time allow, and once the printed volume exceeds the shipping weight of the equipment, you're winning.
;) Paper costs are likely to be excessive though.
:)
I wonder what it would take to modify the "demo buttons" you see attached to printers at the computer store, so that they'd print out short books at the push of a button.
For a really minimalist implementation, a basic stamp with some serial flash and a receipt printer would fit in your pocket, make hardcopy, and run on batteries.
Hmm, on second thought, maybe shipping dead trees is easier. Isn't there some cheap shipping available? You don't need turbo-airmail for 100-year-old text, and if a box gets lost at sea, who cares? Your local used bookstore would love a "fill this bag and I'll give you $10" offer, and send it by the cheapest method available. Repeat this method every few weeks.
If you're not above a little ironic fraud, find the DHL account number that Halliburton uses, and just ship that way.
Try to get a story onto the newswire that one of the locals saw the virgin Mary in a tree or something. Fundie tourists flocking to see the "miracle" will bring bibles with them, some of which will be lost or stolen, which can then have the pages washed and reprinted with something peaceful.
Alternately, get word out that the area harbors Al Qaeda, and the Bush administration will bomb it even closer to the stone age. Then Congress will approve a few billion bucks to build it into a technologically advanced society, and your friend can trade beads to soldiers for books.
For extra points, do both of the above simultaneously.
(If I'm gonna get modded flamebait, I'm gonna deserve it!)
I have a friend with a similar problem.
He is going to Namibia for a year trek into the deep jungle. He will have a lot of down time. He is an avid musician, primarily playing the Harmonica. He currently creates music using GarageBand on his Mac, sticky solely to his sampled harmonica sounds. He is wondering how to bring his Macintosh, multiple CinemaDisplay LCD screens, and surround-sounds speaker setup into the jungle since he has to carry everything in his backpack and there will be no electricity.
He can't bear the thought of not making or hearing any Harmonica music for an entire year. I was thinking I could ship him a PDA and he could write down the sheet music, ship it to me, then I would enter it into GarageBand for him, create a Harmonica song, cut it to MP3, download it to his PDA, and ship it back to him. But this would be difficult and expensive.
Can anyone think of anything else that might work?
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
It's worth looking at the cost of getting a printer in South Africa. Email them some PDFs of the books and get them to print and ship the order for you.
Though, I suspect it may be cheaper to find a 2nd book dealer (in South Africa) with the titles your friend is after.
Go to EBAY and get a handspring or other PDA for next to nothing that accepts some form of extra storage like SD memory or compact flash cards and uses regular batteries, not rechargables.
I've got a Visor Platinum with a Kopsis compact flash card reader right here. A cheap 128MB compact flash will hold over 200 books.
Use Adobe's FREE Acrobat reader for Palm to port the files to the Handspring, and the copy of Acrobat you need to set up the files doesn't have to make the trip.
If your friend runs out of books, set up just another compact flash card and send that.
Don't forget to add AAA batteries to the care package.
Find out if the Peace Corps sends other people either to where she is doing her stint, or if someone will pass through. Send the PDA with them, and have her meet them at the airport. This won't solve the theft in situ problem, but she probably has quite a few personal possessions in that category already, so it is not like an unaddressed problem. At least if you get a PDA to her, shipping her bytes consists of just sending a flash media card in a letter.
She might not live near an Internet cafe, so printing out the material might not be feasible, or might be prohibitively expensive, depending on how much she wants to print out.
I think PDA-based solutions might even beat out microfiche at this time, which surprised me. It was difficult to find out how much Computer Output on Microform (COM) costs; closest page to prices I could find seemed to imply that there is a $175 USD setup fee per run. This page seems to imply a $0.02/page cost. Maybe the Canadian government agency price of $0.12 CAD per image says I'm completely wrong, and if you can ship someone a TIFF file of the entire microfiche, they can turn around the microfiche to you for really dirt cheap. Or they might be talking about a TIFF image per page, and not per microfiche. I would be astonished if it was not priced per page, and really was $0.12 CAD per microfiche. If it was that cheap, then I would reconsider a PDA based solution if cheap microfiche readers can be found.
Oh, alright. Google is not all knowing. Curiosity got the better of me, so I broke down and called Microfacs and spoke with a nice guy named Rick. Minimum pricing is $0.05 USD per page, and they think 2,000 pages is a very small order. For that, the deal goes like this. You ship them single page TIFF images. You get about a week turnaround, and it is in the form of 16mm microfilm. If you want microfiche, that costs extra. I didn't ask, because $0.05 per page sounded like about the limit for the low budgets we are talking about; I'm guessing that $0.10 per page for microfiche. More expensive than a copy shop, but a heck of a lot cheaper to ship around I would imagine.
Recondtioned readers don't go below $130 USD, although some student projects seem to be aware of the advantages of shipping bulk human readable data around on microform (they are aming for a $20 USD reader, for example). There are handheld microfiche readers that use sunlight, but they cost about the same as a new low-end PDA, so you would still have in situ theft concerns. Used readers have $50 USD opening bids on eBay in the here and now. This is all for microfiche readers; search around for 16mm format microfilm readers that are sunlight or battery capable (if she isn't around reliable electricity), though I'm not sure about the prudence of using for long periods of time any readers that you have to peer through optics.
It currently seems tough to beat the TCO combination of an eBay'd Palm, solar panel, and SD media if you are talking about shipping all of Project Gutenberg to her. Microform readers cost more than a cheap PDA, even used and reconditioned, and the reproduction costs can really swing the cost picture into the PDAs favor (even assuming a couple get stolen) when you start dealing with 10,000 pages (roughly the number of proofed Project Gutenberg pages) and up. If she is around re
There are so many post by people who just don't seem to get it. (yeah, yeah, I know this is /.)
Africa is a diverse place with different needs. Many of these project are looking for solutions that are not that different from your typical under funded public library or university. They may have a donated server in the back room that they need to figure out how to best utilize it.
Our project, is working with non-profits and public institutions we have a few systems set up there with OpenBSD and Koha. Koha works just like any other library management software. But it supports links to on-line resources. Ideally having "copyleft" medical journals and Gutenberg text stored locally would be great. The local Internet connections are unreliable. These desires we have for our own schools and research institution are not that different from those on the other side of the pond.
Cheers,
C. Gilbert
Bethany Memorial Foundation
Get a genuine hardcover book, preferably a boring one from an op-shop or bargain bin with a stark (black and white) cover, easy to read through the packaging. Open it, use a craft knife to chop out (a) hollow rectangle(s) for the PDA and accessories. Pad the PDA so it doesn't rattle, tape the book shut with clear tape so it doesn't flop open in transit.
Runs up the shipping costs a little, but since hardcovers feel heavy anyway, only an xray will show it up. You can even thwart some of those by putting a couple of leaves of tinfoil inside the covers, but you'd be better off using tinfoil silhouettes to spell out "P D A" to help avoid bomb scares.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Maybe the problem of getting books there is something that the Peace Corps should be looking at. Teach a man to fish and all that...
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
She's likely to be able to lay hands on a reader for it, too. Shipping her a couple of kilos of microfiche is more likely to succeed and less likely to get stolen than a PDA. At a pinch, she can use a random light-source and a magnifying glass, and/or ship her a fold-down Fresnel lens too.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Same power problems as a PDA, though.
I've tried the text-to-speech books, and it loses so much in the translation as to be unusable. Human read are soooo much better.
http://www.ebookwise.com/ebookwise/ebookwise1150.h tm
I recently got one of these things and it's a great deal. It cost me around $100 (I think it's gone back up to $130 now), so it's not terribly expensive, and it only weighs about a pound or so. You can import your own texts to it (i.e. project gutenberg texts), it can use Smartmedia cards (up to 128mb), so you can store a LOT of books, and the batteries last for about 25 hours and can just be charged off of 12V dc. Hook up a small 12V solar panel to trickle-charge it and you've got yourself around 300+ books for ~$150 or so!
I'm perfect in every way, except for my humility.
This reminds of the time in the early 90's when I was working in Russia and an American Peace Corp worker came to my Hotel Room. All I can remember about the visit was that he kept asking for books to read. The lesson we should all learn from this is to always bring something to read.
www.archiphysics.com
Lik-Sang has a GBA Movie Player module for $24 which reads text files off of CF cards. Use old CF cards for cheap. Get a mini-winder charger (Lik-Sang) (8 mins of hand cranking generates 30 min of operation) and either a Game Boy SP for ~$59 used (smaller than a wallet easy to hide) or a refurbished GameBoy advance ~$35 (nearly disposable). Toss in a magnifier (they do work) and you have a portable human powered library.
Pick any random old winCE PDA from ebay, preferably one that takes standard size batteries, buy a big CF card and a wind-up or solar charger, Send them over wrapped in wadding packed in a video tape box inside a padded envelope. Customs agents will almost certainly just read the postmark from the US, feel that it's a video tape and pass it through. Unlikely to be stolen en route, and if it is, you're only down $70 or $80. You can send another half gigabyte of books for $40 if she can't get the card back to you.
I pay you to get rid of my books?
Is this bizarro world or something? Pay for your own damn books.
In regards to shipping books, the USPS has special information for sending _only_ bound printed matter. Link
I am currently living in SA, and if I had to do this, I would go to www.kalahari.net (a local online bookstore) and have them ship the books to Mozambique. Orders over R300 (about $50) are shipped for free in SA. Their shipping info page says that people in neighbouring countries can contact them for a quote.
# ssh -l neo the_matrix; killall -9 agent_smith
sorry, up a creek without a paddle.
Sounds good, but they do in fact require an external energy source. Solar power is your best bet, but any of the solar subtitutes availble will probably work fine.
No no, you've got the specs wrong. The embedded reader is based on reflective technology and absolutely REQUIRES an external energy source. Best results may be achieved using a giant ball of flaming gas positioned above and behind the user's shoulder. This is actually the preferred source of energy, since giant flaming balls of gas are abundant on this world. In this case you don't have to worry so much about environmental conditions, e.g. even backscatter works fine.
If the giant ball of flaming gas is hidden behind solid objects ("gone where the sun don't shine") and/or is difficult to position (e.g. due to lack of levers and/or fixed points from which to move the Earth), you must simply rely on backscatter from other planetary objects or produce your own energy e.g. by incinerating animal fats.
--Bud
Get a Palm M125 from eBay.
1)They're dirt cheap - no big loss if stolen. Get two in fact, one as a backup.
2)They run for weeks on 2 AAA batteries, no need for a recharger or access to a power supply.
3)They take MMC cards. If you use Weasel reader and the ztxt fomat for compressing books, you can get an average Guttenberg text down to about 250K. So that's about 1000 books on a 256M card. More MMC cards can be posted out from home, as an when required.
How about audiobooks on an iPod Shuffle?
Get two and when she ships one back, ship her another one updated with new audio books.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
This is so fucking ironic that it hurts my head. What a stupid fucking question.
"Who controls the British crown?
Who keeps the metric system down?
We do! We do.
Who leaves the Atlantis off the maps? [shot of Carl]
Who keeps the Martians under wraps? [shot of Lenny]
We do! We do. [shot of Martian]
Who holds back the electric car?
Who makes Steve Guttenberg a star? [shot of Steve]
We do! We do.
Who robs cave fish of their sight? [shot of Skinner]
Who rigs every Oscar night? [shot of Homer]
We do! We do."
Geez, stop writing as if you had the burden of the white man in your shoulders.
First, is it a problem of the mail? the PeaceCorps, as an agency of the State Dept., should have one of the safest mail services around.
Now, if you want to really help, make a money donation to groups that help public libraries in that place, or send money/Gutenberg CDs/Linux CDs to the libraries themselves. If there is local demand for books or computing there, they will be put to good use. and create work for local computer techs, printing shops, etc.
Anyway, your friend should not have time to read much, unless that is her job.
Seriously, you want to send something that's cheap and isn't likely to get stolen. Why is anyone going to steal a cheap secondhand copy of (book)?
When they're done, she can use the books as toilet paper, firestarter, anti-leak roof-reinforcement device, it swats insects, it shields you from the sun, it can be traded for trinkets and/or junk food, passing it around to friends means getting "in", which means other goods are easier to acquire...
There is absolutely no reason why books would not be the smartest choice.
Real books are much more useful under the circumstances. Sending electronics, PDAs, printers - that makes no sense. Even a PDA is a bad idea - batteries are probably expensive as hell, especially good ones.
Gutenberg is overkill. Most of the texts in there are unlikely to be of interest.
Bound paper editions of Gutenberg's top 50, or 100, or 200 would be far better. Many would be available, cheap, at used book stores, or as discount reprinted classics at Barnes & Noble.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
You sign up for '2 years that'll change your life', that'll show you another world, let you make a difference in that distant place, and then you use your off time to read a stack of old books?!
Send your friend a few classics, in hardcover, because a little reading material is always a good thing. Shop around and you'll find 'pocket' editions of classics: smaller books with durable covers and a premium thin/strong/opaque paper. I buy 'em for backpacking trips. Hardcover favorite books have the 2nd advantage of make lasting gifts to friends. Also, anyone can survive 2 years of reading shakespeare, emerson*, Hopkins, or any other collection of a favorite great author/poet (ok, I'd also carry fluff like Douglas Adams* and the occasional USA Today or New Yorker*, even if it's months old and brought in by anyone coming from a nearby city).
But (s)he should meet people, learn a language, try to find someone* willing to teach them the local music/cooking/customs/arts, offer to start up an ad-hoc night class in anything uncontroversial (english, simple math, personal finance*, sanitation (don't laugh...), toe-holds into the world economy*, or whatever). Time spent making relationships with the right people* can also help get PCorps projects done.
Meanwhile, you can put your effort into
Yeah, sending this crap gets expensive. But a couple cd's, a book, some koolade packets, and the latest music from (insert favorite band)*, packed in tootsie rolls, can be worth every cent.
Oh, and be sure to take others' advice and do a little dismantling before shipment, always use words like used, surplus, non-working, parts, scrap, or any other buzzwords your friend recommends, so theft and the VAT or tarrifs don't make the package cost soar even higher. A friend used to even have new pairs of shoes shipped in 2 packages, a month apart: nobody'd steal *one* shoe.
*A lot of asterisks, cuz this is important: Always keep clear of things that'll get people killed for political/power reasons. For 12 years, Mozambique hasn't been a place I'd consider spooky, according to travel.state.gov's current report, but many african nations are, and the political situations can change rapidly, and these people have to live there long after your friend leaves.