0

By David Rothman

olpcebook Check out a TeleBlog reader’s tale of woe dealing with PDF files on his new XO.

Greg loves the sharp screen for reading e-books (“The sunlight screen mode is easily as good as the Sony e-book reader you’d see at a local bookstore like Borders”).

But, so far at least, he is struggling with PDF bloat, at least with his current reader, which takes forever to load files.

Needed: A kid-simple PDF alternative that can read .epub

As a PDF-reader alternative, let’s root for a kid-simple version of the open-source FBReader to appear for the XO, since it could read .epub and HTML books, among other, slimmer formats, not to mention good old-fashioned TXT. Or how about other open-source apps? And if Adobe can take an interest in the XO, too, while using an .epub-friendly approach and working toward interoperable DRM, if we must have “protection”—well, then, so much the better. Hello, Bill McCoy? Any plans for .epub software from Adobe for the XO? Yes, I’d also welcome .epub/XO involvement from Mobipocket and other vendors.

In fact, an experimental XO version of Mobipocket (reader tryouts welcome–share the results!) is available via Pepper Computer’s experimental suite for an earlier version of the OLPC machine. Will it run on the current XO? Ideally with .epub someday?

Not so much fun on a seven-inch screen

But why so much interest in .epub and the programs that do or could run it? The issue isn’t just file bloat. If nothing else, on a seven-inch screen like the XO’s, PDF is a horror unless files are formatted with the seven inches in mind. You end up having to scroll from left to right. 

What’s more, I wonder about DjVu, another format talked up by some XO boosters, on smaller machines. While it’s nice for kids to see books as they appear on paper, why not also allow them the ease of a reflowable format and smaller files? Since DjVu is image-based, files can be only so compact despite the use of compression. The ultimate solution—yes, I know there are costs—would be digital libraries that let students enjoy both images of books and true e-books. That’s going on already. But we need more of it.

Speed issues in a literacy context

Let’s make books as easy as possible to enjoy—including long ones. While the XO seems more for younger children than older ones and adults, why not give people of all ages a chance to catch up easily with longer books? Do we really want to Twitterize kids’ attention spans? Twitter, IM and the rest serve their purposes, but I hate the idea of the OLPC not encouraging the sustained thought that comes with the reading of books, especially longer ones.

Details: Perhaps future XO-related software will speed up downloading of large files, or maybe Greg is encountering special difficulties. I’d love to hear from other XO owners. What readers are they using? And, Greg, what is your current reader for PDF on your XO? Xbook? Evince?

And thoughts on the issue of .epub vs. HTML books: Both can serve a purpose. But .epub is the standard toward which the large publishers are heading, including the ones who insist on DRM. I don’t like DRM and will keep up my fight against it, but meanwhile I want XO users to have a wide choice of books. Oh, and remember: .epub per se is not a DRMed format. The more the public domain community embraces it, the less it will be associated with nasty DRM lockups.

Related: XO laptop e-book video reminds us that the Kindle isn’t the be-all and end-all for every reader.

 
0