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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."
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).
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?