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By David Rothman

image I begged. I pleaded. Please, OLPC, get serious about FBReader. I sold my OLPC laptop partly because FBReader was not adapted to Sugar for the laptop—as an alternative to the reading software that came with the machine. FBReader ran on the OLPC’s XO-1 laptop, but it was a hassle to install and use. Perhaps just as importantly, it wasn’t customized for schoolchildren in the early grades.

What a shame. With FBReader, for example, students could enjoy access to well-presented public domain books from sources such as Feedbooks. No longer would they be quite so reliant on PDF files. The industry-standard ePub format, reflowable, would be much nicer on the little laptops’ screens. That’s what FBReader could offer.

Now at turns out that FBReader developer Nikolay Putsin and Samuel Klein of OLPC are in touch; and on an OLPC server, you can even see a copy of P.G. Wodehouse‘s My Man Jeeves as presented experimentally with FBReader and a Sugarized interface. Good luck to everyone at both ends—FBReader and OLPC! The OLPC’s book-optimized successor to the XO-1 isn’t that far off. It’s due next year.

Detail: As far as I know, that is not FBReader shown on the screen of the XO-2 in the photo above.

Update, 3 p.m. March 2: Thanks to Hadrien Gardeur of Feedbooks for introducing the OLPC and FBReader folks to each other via e-mail.

 
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