The Readers are the Leaders"

  The Author's Mother

George Pal's movie The Time Machine has spoken to me ever since I saw it at the local YMCA as a child.  In it Rod Taylor the Time Traveller travels hundreds of thousands of years into the future to discover that humanity has split into two branches: the beautiful, passive Eloi, and the repulsive, cannibalistic Morlocks who live underground and use the Eloi as cattle.  It is strongly implied that the Eloi achieved their degraded state because they neglected reading and did not take care of their books.  At the end of the movie the Time Traveller returns to the Eloi with a gift that he will use to help them regain their humanity: three books.   We are not told which ones.

If this vision of the future is less likely now than it seemed to me when I first saw the film, much of the credit is due to volunteers that are working to preserve books in the public domain in electronic form, and others creating new works with Creative Commons licenses that allow free distribution.

Of course having books in electronic format would be of no use if there was no way to read them.  InThe Time Machine the Eloi had magic talking rings that would tell them stories when they were spun on a special table.  Like much of today's technology it gave a great demo but was closed, proprietary, and ultimately impractical.  Today we have something better than magic talking rings: low cost computers from the One Laptop Per Child project running the Sugar operating environment.  If the Time Traveller had chosen not to help the Eloi regain their humanity but to prevent them from losing it in the first place I am convinced he could do no better than to become involved in this project.

When I proposed writing this book specifically about creating and using e-books with Sugar several people suggested that I would do better to write a general book on e-books and only mention Sugar as one e-book reading platform among many.  They had a reasonable point.  Much of the material in this book will be of interest to those with Kindles, Nooks, iPads, cheap tablets running Android, and any other kind of computer that can read an e-book.  However, I make no apology for focusing attention on the Sugar platform.  It is in my opinion poised to become the best available e-book reading platform.  Significantly, it is an outstanding platform for free e-books.

If your knowledge of e-books comes from ads for products like the Kindle, the Nook, or even the iPadyou could be forgiven for thinking that e-books don't have much to offer.  For instance, you may have thought that e-books would be less expensive than regular books, only to find out that publishers want almost as much money for a current e-book as they do for a hardbound book, and unlike a normal book an e-book cannot be loaned out or resold. (There actually are a couple of of ways to share commercial e-books.  Some e-book readers can share books with others that own the same device, and some public libraries have a way of loaning out commercial e-books in a way that prevents the number of copies loaned out is not greater than the number they bought.  It will be some time before loaning out e-books is as simple and practical as loaning out printed books, and nobody is developing ways to resell e-books). 

If there is an e-book revolution coming, as I believe there is, you won't find it in the world of commercial products. The revolution will happen with e-books that are in the public domain or that are licensed for free downloading. Consider the following: 

• There are over about two million free e-books available, including some of the best ever written.
• There are applications for Sugar and the XO laptop to search catalogs of free e-books and download them to your computer. 
• You don't need an XO laptop to run Sugar.  With Sugar on a Stick you can install Sugar on a bootable USB thumb drive and take it and your e-book library wherever you go.  You can use this thumb drive to run Sugar on most PCs and Macs. 
  
• Anyone can easily make his own e-book and publish it. 
  
• If you have a bound and printed book and a digital camera, you can make an e-book from that book.  If the book is in the public domain you can even publish it.
• If you don't have any books to convert to e-books you can volunteer to proofread other people's e-books on the Distributed Proofreaders website. 
  
• With web-based tools like Booki you can collaborate on writing a book with people you've never met in person.  The book can be published as a website, in e-book format, or even sent to a print-on-demand service to create bound and printed copies. 
  

Access to free e-books can change how we do education.  If the authors of the History book your school uses give Thomas Jefferson less credit than he deserves, you can easily find material to remedy this deficiency.  Are you putting  on a school play?  There are many you could put on without paying royalties, free to download.  Do you teach French?  Project Gutenberg has the works of French authors in their original language.   Do you have dyslexic students?  The e-book reader for Project Gutenberg texts can read texts aloud with the word being spoken highlighted.

The benefits of free e-books can become even greater when you learn to make them yourself.  Indeed, the invention of the e-book changes forever what it means to be a publisher.  Our descendants will not have to make do with three well chosen volumes.  Instead, they will have access to millions!

E-Books On The XO Laptop 

The design of the XO laptop shows the importance the project gives to e-book reading.  The XO has a screen that can swivel 180 degrees to turn the laptop into a tablet, and the screen orientation can be rotated to display a full page of text.  With the back light turned off the student can even read his e-books by sunlight.

Here is the XO laptop with the screen folded into the tablet orientation for reading e-books: 

The Purpose of This Book

As I was writing this book I realized time and again that I was writing not about something that is, but something that is in the process of becoming.  For instance, there are millions of free e-books available, but more children's books, recent books, and books in languages other than English are needed.  There are Activities for Sugar that make it very easy to find and download e-books, but not every available e-book can be had that way yet.  The Sugar platform offers excellent Activities for reading and sharing e-books, but it can still be improved.  There is excellent software under development for publishing your own e-books, and there is excellent software being developed for collaborating on the web to create e-books.  If you're the kind of person who likes to get in on the ground floor, you'll find this book a guide to where you can do so. 

if you're the kind of person who has to make the best of what's available, this book is for you too. 

This book is about using Sugar, the XO laptop and free e-books to their full potential.  It will describe the strengths and weaknesses of the different e-book formats, where to find free e-books, the Activities available for reading them and their features and functions, and finally how to create and publish your own free e-books.

The contributors to this book have extensive experience working with e-books.  The main author wrote several Activities for finding and reading e-books on the XO.  For this book he designed and built his own book scanner, created e-books from several hardbound books, and donated them to the Internet Archive and to Project Gutenberg.  The other contributors are involved with the Rural Design Collective, an organization that has done work for the Internet Archive. 

from:http://en.flossmanuals.net/ReadingandSugar/SourcesForFreeEBooks

Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg is the oldest source of free e-books and still one of the best.  It is mostly known for its Plain Text files but other formats are available as well.  There are three Project Gutenberg sites that you can get books from:

Project Gutenberg at http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page 

Project Gutenberg Australia at http://gutenberg.net.au/ 

Project Gutenberg Canada at http://www.gutenberg.ca/  

There are other affiliated sites but any books they provide should also be available at the main site. 

The reason Project Gutenberg Australia is different is that copyright laws in Australia are different than in the United States so they can host titles that the United States cannot.  (There are also some titles that are in the public domain in the U.S. but still under copyright in Australia).

The website explains, "As a general rule the works of authors who died before 1955 are in the public domain in Australia. Works by George Orwell (died 1950), Virginia Woolf (died 1941), and James Joyce (died 1941), just to name a few authors, are in the public domain in Australia.

"Of course, works which are in the public domain in Australia may remain copyrighted in other Countries, even for several decades. People may not download, or read online, such works if they are in a country where they are still under copyright. That still leaves a lot of readers out there to enjoy etexts of some of the greatest literary works of the twentieth century."

Project Gutenberg Canada  is in a similar situation to its Australian sister site.  Canadian copyright law puts books in the public domain 50 years after the author's death.  Australia used to do that, but now is a life + 70 country, except for books where the author died before 1955.  Canada is under some pressure to change its copyright laws, but for now Canada can host more recent books than Australia can. 

This is a typical book listing from the main website showing the formats that are available for the Jules Verne book Les Cinq Cents Millions De La Bégum (The Begum's Fortune):

Encoding is the character set used for the Plain Text file.  Nearly all books have a us-ascii version.  Books in languages other than English will in addition have an iso-8859 version or a UTF-8 version.  These encodings allow for things like accents and other diacritical marks.  As the site explains:

"Plain text files often come in more than one encoding. us-ascii encoding is supported on virtually any device but has a very limited choice of characters. It is not suitable for any language except English. iso-8859-1 (also known as Latin1) is supported on any Windows-class machine or better. It is suitable for most Western European languages. utf-8 is suitable for any language but needs a display program that knows utf-8 and you have to install appropriate fonts for the language you are trying to display."

The HTML version is suitable for reading online and may or may not have illustrations.  The EPUBversion will be generated from the HTML version.  EPUBs from Project Gutenberg may or may not have illustrations, but they are some of the highest quality EPUBs available.

Project Gutenberg has many titles to offer to children old enough to appreciate books without pictures.  These include all the Oz books, Sherlock Holmes, all of Jules Verne, Alice in Wonderland, classic science fiction from E.E. Smith, Stanley G. Weinbaum, and many others, plus juvenile novels like the Tom Swift books, The Girl Aviators series, and much more.

Students and teachers of History will find that Project Gutenberg has much to offer as well. 

The Internet Archive

The Internet Archive is a site devoted to preserving the public domain.  In addition to books they have movies, music, and even some software that is in the public domain.  There are over a million and a half e-books available from this site.  The URL for e-books is:

http://www.archive.org/details/texts 

Internet Archive books are created by scanning page images, including the covers of the books.  When you read one of them the visual experience is very much like reading the original book.  The website lets you read the book online in "flipbook" format, which is very much like paging through the original book:

The formats offered by IA are PDF, Black and White PDF (for some of the more colorful books, to create a smaller file), DjVu, and EPUB.  DjVu offers color pages with smaller file sizes than either of the PDF formats.  EPUB files from IA are at the moment not the best quality, but over time this should improve.  Right now they combine badly proofread text with only a few illustrations.

There is a Children's Book Collection at the Internet Archive at this URL:

http://www.archive.org/details/iacl  

Quite a few of the books are from the 1800's and more of interest to children's book collectors than actual children, but you can find the Oz books, books by Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan), Jules Verne, Andrew Lang's Fairy Books, The Wind In The Willows, etc. all with illustrations.

The Internet Archive is one of the few places you can download public domain comic books, although there aren't many and most are in the .cbr format instead of .cbz.

The simplest way to find the books you want from the Internet Archive is to use the Book Serverpage at this URL:

http://www.archive.org/bookserver 

Just type in author, title or subject words in the text field on this page and you'll get a list of all the titles available and the formats they can be had in:

This page will show results not just for the Internet Archive but also for Feedbooks and other sources.

Feedbooks

Feedbooks offers public domain titles from Project Gutenberg converted from Plain Text to PDFformat.  This gives them nicer fonts, fancy chapter headings, bold and italicized text where needed, and introductory material usually from Wikipedia.  They also have some original books of their own for download.  They are located at:

http://www.feedbooks.com/  

The Rural Design Collective

The Rural Design Collective (@rdcHQ) is a not-for-profit professional mentoring organization which furthers the education and experience of residents of rural Southern Coastal Oregon who are interested in working with web and/or media technology by involving them in real development projects. They devote a portion of their program to continued exploration of technology surrounding digital books. In 2009, they built an interface for approximately 2000 digital books using a subset from the Internet Archive Children's Library. The Internet Archive Bookreader was modified to view the books online in a single page format to enhance functionality on OLPC XO gen-1 computers.

A web demonstration of that project is available at: http://www.ruraldesigncollective.org/lab/ui/

ManyBooks.net

ManyBooks.net is located at this URL:

http://manybooks.net/  

They offer over 27,000 titles, mostly converted from Project Gutenberg Plain Text files.  They offer several formats for each title, including PDF, large print PDF, EPUB, Plain Text and RTF.  Their PDFs are different from Feedbooks PDFs because they generally include a book cover image (but no other illustrations) at the beginning of the document.

The Baen Free Library

The Baen Free Library is different from the rest of these sites because it deals with titles that are still copyrighted.  Baen Books gives away free e-book downloads of some of their titles, with the author's permission, to encourage sales of the printed books they publish.

Baen publishes science fiction titles, including books by James P. Hogan, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and many other well known authors.  They offer the books in several formats, but the closest thing to an open format they offer is Rich Text Format.  You can load this into your favorite word processor, but a word processor is not an e-book reader.  Your best options with these titles are to use Open Office to convert the RTF to a PDF, or to use an e-book reader like Read Etexts that can convert an RTF to a Plain Text file.

Most of these books are suitable for younger readers and are much more current than anything in the public domain.

free literature

This site contains links to over 600 sites that are sources of free e-books in many languages.

http://www.freeliterature.org/  

Free E-Book Formats 

For the purposes of this book I consider an e-book to be in a file that can be downloaded to the computer and read when the computer is not connected to the network.  There are many websites where you can read a book online, but I don't consider websites to be e-books.

I'm also going to limit the list to formats that can be read on a computer without dealing with Digital Rights Management.  Free e-books are likely to be the only ones without DRM.

Plain Text 

This is the oldest format and the simplest.  A plain text file just contains letters, numbers, punctuation, and spaces.  There may be a newline character (the character you make when you press Enter to start a new line) at the end of each line, or newlines may be just used to separate paragraphs.  There are no changes in font, no bold, no italics, no underlines.  By convention a word is considered to be bold if it has asterisks (*) before and after it.   A word is considered italicized if it has underline characters (_) before and after. 

Advantages

Plain text produces the smallest files by far.  It is the simplest format to create a reader for, so it is supported on the most devices.  While all the text needs to be displayed in the same font, you can make the font as large or small as you need it to be and the text will wrap itself to fit in the available space, making it a good choice for readers that can benefit from a larger font.  Because it is so simple to support in a reader program the program might have features that are not supported for other formats.  In the case of Sugar, plain text files are the only ones (so far) that have support for text to speech with highlighting.

Disadvantages

No illustrations.  This makes it a poor format for children's books.

Portable Document Format (PDF)

This is one of the most popular formats.  It is a compressed version of the PostScript language used to format pages for printers.  What you see on the screen looks exactly like the page printed using the original PostScript.

Advantages

This is an attractive format that can support having illustrations.

Disadvantages

A PDF is designed to show exactly what a printed page will look like, and not every printed page works on the screen.  Multiple columns, tiny fonts and landscape page orientation can make a PDF unusable on the screen.

Another issue with a PDF is that the text cannot be reformatted.  You can zoom in on a PDF but unlike plain text you can't make the text larger and have it wrap to fit on the page.

Image Container PDF's

Image Container PDF is a term used by the Internet Archive to describe a PDF that is composed entirely of images of book pages.  This format gives the reader an experience as much as possible like reading the original book.  PDFs created this way can have a "text layer" created by Optical Character Recognition, making these e-books searchable. 

Advantages

An excellent format for children's books, which often have pictures and other decorations on every page. 

Disadvantages

PDFs composed of images have huge file sizes (20 megabytes or more is common for Internet Archive PDF's, 50 megabytes and up is common for PDF's like this you create yourself) and highly decorated books can use a lot of memory to read, in extreme cases causing out of memory errors.

Comic Book Zip (CBZ)

A CBZ file is simply a bunch of sequentially named images stored in a Zip archive file.  Generally the suffix on the archive is renamed from .zip to .cbz.

There is a related format Comic Book RAR (CBR) which is used more often than CBZ.  This uses a RAR archive file rather than a Zip file, so you need to have a commercial program to create RAR archives.  This may give a slightly smaller file size than a CBZ, but in my opinion not enough to make it preferable to CBZ.

Advantages

Smaller file size than a PDF created with the same images.  Very easy to create.

Disadvantages

No support for text to make the pages searchable like PDF has.

DjVu

DjVu is an alternative to PDF's created with book page images.  DjVu is a method of compressing these images that is optimized for documents and book pages.  As a result .djvu files are smaller than the equivalent PDF and can take less memory to read.

Advantages

Noticeably smaller file size than PDF's composed of page images. Also smaller than CBZ's. 

Disadvantages

Only supported by the later versions of the Read Activity which requires a newer version of Sugar than .82.  Most XO laptops run .82 or older.

Rich Text Format (RTF)

This is a file format invented by Microsoft to simplify sharing documents between different brands of word processor.  Most word processors can read and write this format as well as their own format.

It may seem like a stretch to consider RTF as a format for e-books, but in fact there are e-books that use this format.  Of all the e-book formats distributed by the Baen Free Library website only RTF is usable in Sugar .82.

Advantages

I can't think of any.

Disadvantages

Really there are only two ways to use an RTF file as an e-book: load it into a word processor and convert it to a PDF, then read that file, or use an e-book reader like Read Etexts that will convert the RTF to a plain text file when it first loads it.

EPUB

EPUB is a format specifically meant for e-books, unlike all the other formats discussed so far.  It is based on XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets like a web page, and can include image files, but the various files are stored in a single Zip archive file.  There is special XML file called an NCX that provides a table of contents for the document.

This is The Big Book of Aviation for Boys as an EPUB with illustrations.  I created the EPUB for this book. 

Advantages

Like PDFs an EPUB can contain formatted text and illustrations.

Like a plain text file the text can be made larger or smaller and the text will re-wrap to fit in the visible space.

The file size is small.

The format is supported on many devices as well as on computers.  It may become the most popular e-book format. 

Disadvantages

Like DjVu, it is only supported by the latest versions of the Read Activity that will not run on Sugar .82.

While many free e-books are available that use the EPUB format, few make full use of what the format has to offer.  Project Gutenberg EPUBs may or may not have illustrations, and EPUB's from the Internet Archive are made from OCR'd text that has often not been proofed and corrected.

This is Pride and Prejudice from Project Gutenberg as an EPUB, without illustrations:

Here is the same book from the Internet Archive, with illustrations but badly needing proofreading:

Sugar Activities For Finding E-Books 

Introduction

The Sugar environment uses a Journal to keep all the student's work in, instead of using files and directories.  Every e-book you read will have its own entry in the Journal.  In addition to the file for the book the entry will have metadata about the book, including a meaningful Title, aDescription of the book, and Keywords.

If you download all your books using the Browse Activity you'll find that the file you download will have a meaningless name and the Title it will have in the Journal will be long but still meaningless.  You would need to correct the Title and perhaps add a Description for the book yourself.

There is a better alternative to using Browse for most of your e-book downloading needs.  In fact, there are three of them.

Get Books

The Get Books Activity is the newest of the three.  It lets users search for books from multiple online sources such as the Internet Archive and Feedbooks. It also provides support for removable devices ("Library on a Stick") which have OPDS catalogs in the root directory.  OPDS (Open Publication Distribution System) is a kind of book catalog that anyone who publishes e-books can create.  Currently the Internet Archive and Feedbooks have such catalogs, so Get Books can download titles from their catalogs.  Feedbooks has titles from Project Gutenberg converted to PDFs.  This means that the majority of free e-books available can be found and downloaded to your Journal using this Activity.

This is what the Activity looks like downloading a book about Thomas Jefferson: 

OPDS is part of the BookServer ecosystem which has been described as follows:

"The BookServer is a growing open architecture for vending and lending digital books over the Internet. Built on open catalog and open book formats, the BookServer model allows a wide network of publishers, booksellers, libraries, and even authors to make their catalogs of books available directly to readers through their laptops, phones, netbooks, or dedicated reading devices. BookServer facilitates pay transactions, borrowing books from libraries, and downloading free, publicly accessible books."

Get Internet Archive Books

If OPDS represents the future of searching for and downloading e-books it is reasonable to say that the other two Activities represent the less than perfect present.  Get Internet Archive Books is based on the Advanced Search provided by the Internet Archive.  Because of this it will never work with anything other than the Internet Archive.  On the other hand, because it restricts itself to just one source of books it can do things that Get Books can't do.  For instance, it can download e-books in all four formats that IA offers: PDF, B/W PDF, Deja Vu, and EPUB.  Second, in the search results listing you will see Title, Volume, Author, and Language where Get Books only shows title and author. 

Read Etexts

Read Etexts is an Activity meant to read the Plain Text files produced by Project Gutenberg andProject Gutenberg Australia.  These sites do not yet support OPDS but they do both provide text files that can be used as a catalog of what books are available and how the files are named and stored on their systems.  PG began in the days when MS-DOS was the most popular operating system for personal computers, so all of their files have eight character file names.  In the first few years they were in operation they tried to make these short names somewhat meaningful, but they later changed to a new system which gave every book a completely meaningless number.  Some of the old books have been renamed to the new format, others have not.  Also, while just about every book has a 7-bit ascii format file available many have and need another encoding that can represent the diacritical marks used by languages other than English.

When you download a book using Read Etexts it tries to make sense of all this for you.  It looks for an 8-bit encoded file first, and if it doesn't find one it downloads the 7-bit version.  It gives the Journal entry it creates a meaningful title, like Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen rather than 56436.zip.

Another difference between the Read Etexts book search and the other two is that the book catalog is included in the Activity, so you can search for books when you are not connected to the network.  The PG offline catalog is not updated often enough to justify downloading it and converting it every time you search for a book.

Read Etexts looks like this in action:

The Read Activity

The Read Activity is one of the core Activities of Sugar, and will already be installed in whatever version of Sugar you are using.  Although it is available athttp://activities.sugarlabs.org  you generally will not upgrade to a newer version of Read than the one you were given because Read is not fully self contained, so the version of Read that works with the latest Sugar will not work with Sugar .82, for instance.

The newest versions of Read use a different kind of toolbar than the older versions.  Since the XO laptop currently only supports Sugar .82 the screenshots will show the older version of Read.  I'll switch to showing the latest Read to demonstrate features only supported on that version.

You will usually start Read by resuming a book that you have downloaded to the Journal.   The PDF format is supported by all versions of Read.  If you are using a later version of Sugar than .82 then Read will also support these formats:

• DjVu
• Comic Book Zip (CBZ)
• EPUB

This is what Read looks like when you resume a PDF.  The Read toolbar is selected by default. 

The arrow buttons let you page pack and forth through the document.  Normally this is not the way you would navigate.  The normal way is to use the Page Up and Page Down keys or the arrow keys.  When the XO laptop is in tablet orientation you can use the game controls to navigate through the document.

The text field with the current page number in it can also be used to navigate.  Enter the page number you wish to go to and press the Enter key to skip to that page.

The dropdown control is for PDFs that have a table of contents that lets you skip to a chapter.  Very few PDFs have this, and PDFs from Feedbooks for example do not have them.

The Read Activity remembers what page you left off on when you close it and will return to that page automatically when you resume the book later.  Unfortunately this does not work if you turn off or reboot your computer between ending the Activity and resuming it if you are using Sugar .82.  The problem is with that version of Sugar (and older ones), not with the Read Activity.  Sugar .84 and later fix this. 

The next screen shot shows the Activity toolbar.  This is where you can close the Activity, rename the Journal entry, and share the book with others on the network.  

In the screenshot above we have changed the Share with option from Private to My Neighborhood.  This makes your book available for copying by anyone on the network.  In theNeighborhood view this is what everyone will see: 

If the person seeing this clicks on Join he will get the book copied to his own Journal.

Next we'll look at the Edit toolbar: 

The Edit toolbar lets you search for text strings in your book, plus copy text selections to the clipboard.  What may surprise you is that it can do this even for the books from the Internet Archive, which are made from scanned page images.  This is because behind the page image is a text representation of the text on the page.  In the screen shot above someone is searching for the word "Bingley" in Pride and Prejudice.  Note that the search only works as well as the quality of the text representation allows it to.  The text is created by OCR and generally is not proofread afterwards.

Copying a passage to the clipboard from this kind of book works too, as this screen shot shows: 

As you can see, the words "Is that his design in settling here?" have been successfully copied to the clipboard.  Regrettably the words do not get highlighted on the page when you select them in this kind of book.  They do get highlighted in a conventional PDF.

Next, the View toolbar: 

The first four controls on this toolbar adjust the size of the page.  They can only zoom in and out on the page for PDFs, CBZs, and DjVus.  They cannot simply make the font larger and reflow the text on the page for these formats, although that is possible for EPUBs.

Now we come to a function of Read that is only supported on the latest versions of that Activity: multiple annotated bookmarks.  The star button shown in the toolbar below creates a bookmark and opens up a dialog where you may give the bookmark a Title and a Description. 

When you close the dialog you'll see that the book has had a star placed to the left of the page.  You can use the arrow buttons on the toolbar not only to move between pages but also between bookmarks, as shown here: 

The Read Etexts Activity

The Read Etexts Activity can be used to read e-books inPlain Text and RTF formats, the two formats that the core Read Activity cannot handle.  It was originally written as a stopgap Activity for reading Project Gutenberg etexts until such time as the core Read Activity could be enhanced to read them.  However, Read Etexts has grown to be something more.  Because Plain Text files are so simple, it was easy to add features to the Activity that Read does not provide.  These features include:

• Text To Speech with word highlighting.
• A built in offline book catalog that allows searching for and downloading books from Project Gutenberg and Project Gutenberg Australia.
• Text passages may be highlighted and underlined.  Pages may be annotated, and multiple bookmarks may be set.  All of these are stored in the book file itself, so when you share a book either over the network or by copying it to a thumb drive your annotations, bookmarks, and highlights go with it.
• When the book's font size is changed the text wraps to fit within the margins.
• The latest version of Read Etexts supports every version of Sugar from .82 onwards.  On newer versions of Sugar it uses the new style toolbar.
• On Sugar .82 it can return to the page number you left off on, even if you shut down or rebooted since you closed the book. 
  

The Read Toolbar 

When you start Read Etexts by resuming a Journal entry the Read toolbar is the first thing you see: 

This is similar to the Read toolbar in the core Read Activity, with the addition of a Bookmark button (the star) and an Underline button.  Clicking on the Bookmark button sets and unsets the bookmark for the page, just like it does in the latest Read.  The difference is that in Read bookmarks have attached titles and descriptions.  In Read Etexts bookmarks are simply bookmarks.

Here is an example of a highlighted passage. 

You can highlight multiple passages on a page, and they are shown with a yellow background and underlined.  On the XO laptop the underlines will be visible in the monochrome mode the screen uses when the backlight is turned off.

Bookmarks look the same as they do in the latest Read and you can use the menus under the arrow buttons on the toolbar to navigate between them. 

You can add annotations to any page, like this: 

The Activity Toolbar 

The Activity toolbar is the same as Read has, and you can share books just like you can with Read.  One small difference is in the Title of the book.  Read puts the page number in a place that goes away when the computer shuts down or reboots if you're using Sugar .82 or older.  Read Etexts puts the page number at the end of the title with a "P" in front of it.  Thus even when using older versions of Sugar Read Etexts will not forget what page you stopped reading on. 

The Edit Toolbar

The Edit toolbar is the same as for Read and supports text searches and copying selected text to the clipboard. 

The View Toolbar

The View toolbar lets you make the font larger and smaller.  The text will wrap to fit within the margins, and the font size you choose will be saved and applied to all etextrs you read until you change it again.  The third control hides the toolbar so you can use the full screen for reading.  You can also make the font larger with the + key, smaller with the - key, and toggle full screen mode with Alt-Enter. 

When you increase the font size most books will re-flow nicely, but a few will not.  The ones that don't have at least one really, really long paragraph.  When Read Etexts gets a book from Project Gutenberg it attempts to remove the line endings from the text so it can flow naturally.  Read Etexts breaks pages on paragraph boundaries.  When you have really long paragraphs this becomes unworkable, so when the conversion function encounters such a paragraph it gives up on the conversion and the original text with breaks at the end of each line is used instead.

Relatively few books will have this issue, but its important to know when you encounter one why it is happening. 

The Speech Toolbar

Read Etexts supports Text To Speech for one page at a time.  The controls from left to right start and pause speech, let you select a voice appropriate to the text, adjust pitch, and adjust rate of speech.  Pitch and Rate settings are saved and used for all etexts until you change them again. 

In Sugar .82 the needed supporting files to use TTS are not provided by default, but you can add them yourself with the following command:

yum install gstreamer-plugins-espeak

 You may be disappointed with the highlighting of text on an XO laptop.  Speech will sound fine, but the highlighting may lag behind the words being spoken.  On a more powerful computer this will not be a problem. 

The Books Toolbar

The Books toolbar is only available when you start Read Etexts from the Activity ring without resuming an existing book.  It lets you search an offline catalog of books from Project Gutenbergand Project Gutenberg Australia, then download them to the Journal.  A special feature of this download is that it will automatically choose the best available format for a book.  It will always look for a book in ISO-8859 format first and will only download the ASCII version if there is nothing better.

While the Books toolbar is the easiest way to copy books to the Journal for use by Read Etexts, it is not the only way.  You can also use the Browse Activity to download books from Project Gutenberg.  When you do, choose the Zip version of the book, not the text version.  The reason is simple: when you select the Text version Browse will display it as if it was a web page and give you no way to download it.  Browse will be able to download the Zip version.

When downloading books from the Baen Free Library you can download the RTF format.  There is also a Zipped RTF that Read Etexts would be able to read, but for some reason Browse has difficulty downloading that one. 

The View Slides Activity

View Slides is an Activity for viewing collections of image files stored in Zip archives.  Since this is identical to the CBZ format (with the CBZ format using a .cbz suffix on the file instead of .zip) View Slides can be used as a reading Activity for comic books.  The latest Read also supports the CBZ format so if you're using Sugar on a Stick you don't need View Slides to read comic books, but those running Sugar .82 will need it.

There are no large repositories of public domain comic books.  Most of the CBZ's and CBR's you'll find on the Internet violate someone's copyright, although there are a few legal ones on the Internet Archive that you can find by searching for "CBZ" or "CBR", such as theGunsmoke comic shown in the screen shots.  Gunsmoke was in the CBR format so I needed to convert it to CBZ.  In Windows you can do that with the free 7Zip utility that you can download here:

http://www.7-zip.org/ 

What you need to do is unpack the .cbr file to get the individual images, then zip them up and rename the .zip suffix of the new file to .cbz.

While there are not many legal free comic books, the CBZ format is an easy one to create and is a good choice for children who want to make their own e-books.  In addition to being a reader for this format, View Slides can create and edit files in this format.

Like Read Etexts, View Slides supports most versions of Sugar and will use a new-style toolbar if the version of Sugar supports it.  The screen shots in this chapter are a mix of old and new. 

The Read toolbar is the same as Read Etexts without the Underline button: 

Using the new style toolbar the most commonly used controls are always visible: 

Like the other reading Activities you can hide the toolbar and view images full screen: 

The Slides toolbar is used to organize the images in a .cbz file.  You can add images, delete them, rename them, and extract images to create entries in the Journal.  The Available Images column shows image files in the Journal as well as images on removable media like thumb drives and SD cards.  The Slideshow Image column shows the images in your .cbz.  When you select an entry in either column it will be previewed in the area above the image lists.