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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."
Doesn't the OLPC have a B&W passive mode on it's display... the first version did.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
I can read one book a day...
Visit the Arcade Restoration Workshop @ http://www.arcaderestoration.com
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.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
Both versions of the XO laptop (1.5 as well as 1) have dual mode screens (the backlight can be turned off to enable reflective mode).
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 $150 XO seem less appealing. I suspect that if they had just slapped a slightly modified Ubuntu on there as soon as the hardware was ready and started marketing it, they would have had a winner. But they spent months perfecting it, while others developed products that would compete with the XO.
Of course, the XO was never intended to be a hardware platform; it was a hardware/software platform that shipped with its own ideology about how it's users would interact with the computer and each other. Essentially it was as much a research project as it was a product.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
You are probably just trolling; but that is completely wrong. One of the main distinguishing features of the XO-1 is its dual mode screen. You can either run with the backlight on, and get color and visibility in the dark, or you can run with the backlight off, and get a high-resolution reflective LCD that is the next best thing to e-ink for reading(along with having LCD level refresh rates and slightly nicer contrast ratio). If you run the backlight at low brightness, you can even get a bit of both, mostly reflective black and white; but with some hints of color.
I have an XO-1, and the screen is frankly the most interesting part for me. The industrial design is very good, for its intended purpose, but I'm not really its intended purpose, so that is a bit of a mixed blessing; but the screen is, for the moment, simply unique among available devices.
Although there's not much that can be done about it due to copyright laws, the fact that they're restricted to public-domain books likely skews it even more: there's a lot of 20th-century and 21st-century African literature, for example, but much less from pre-1923.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
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
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
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.
Many are, though a good deal aren't. I don't see a way to browse their texts archive 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!
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
And how many of these books are in Spanish? Or French, or Farsi, or what have you? And with pictures?
I used to work in a small, poor town in the developing world. My community had a library with about 10 linear feet of shelving. All the books were in Spanish, but . . .
None of them had pictures.
The "local interest" titles were these impenetrable desk-breakers of 19th century poetry by some aristocrat from the big city.
There were only two or three fiction titles. Dante's Inferno counts, right?
I never once saw a child pick a book off that shelf, not even after an hour's wait while Mom ran an errand. There was nothing there that would appeal to a beginning reader. Hell, given the historical literacy handicaps in the region, those titles would have defeated most of the adults I knew.
If you want to encourage literacy (in the developing world or elsewhere) you've got to start small. Pictures. Rhymes and silly sounds. It takes years to get most kids up to chapter book readiness. Canterbury Tales ain't where you start!
John Hancock wuz here.
If you switch to Teapot's ubuntu release, there's a hotkey to drop down to high dpi B&W mode, even with backlight full on. It's pretty great.
I'm extremely pleased with mine running like this. FBreader(?) works very well for ebook duties. I wish the screen was available on other machines, it's really great tech.
I do like the keyboard tech as well, but it's not as standout as the screen, I think.
--- Do you believe in the day?
Immigrants from some countries do typically perform above average in American universities, but generally only those from countries where the immigration distribution is skewed towards the better-educated upper-class of that country, as with those who come to the U.S. from India, China, and parts of Africa. In cases where we get a different socioeconomic skew, like with Mexican immigrants, the same patterns of overachievement aren't borne out.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Not necessarily. Many African countries were not members of or don't subscribe to the Berne Convention , so many copyrights would be Public Domain there. The few countries that do have some copyright laws lack the manpower, or political willpower to actually enforce them. A complete list of Countries Copyright laws and standards is here.
If our elected representatives no longer represent us, do we still live in a Democracy?
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.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
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.
Digital Citizen
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.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Actually giving them the computers might be enough to teach them English. There was the Hole in a Wall project where they dumped a computer on a Indian village and just left it there in a public place. When they came back the children had all learned English.
cat
Dear me, there are a lot of nay-sayers posting here. I wonder why? I can't inherently see something terrible about providing a large number of books for the world's poorest, yet the comments here would have me believe that it is hopeless, and everybody has an anecdote about why there's no point in even trying.
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.
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.