Their new Open Library OLPC bookreader is lovely, and has been tweaked to recognize the XO’s gamepad keys for navigation, and to display in both normal and rotated screen modes. Many thanks to Anand and Aaron Swartz for making this work. Web whiz Rebecca Malamud worked up a lovely portal for children, customized to display well on the XO, and Aaron helped make sure the first demo library bundle of OpenLibrary books is available for testing.
With this work, the 1.1 million public domain books of the Open Library are available, OCR’ed text and all, to everyone with an XO and an internet connection. Now we are working on making them work better offline, for children whose primary connection to the Internet’s archives is through a friend with a USB key who visits from time to time.
I hope that we can come up with an awesome collection of reading lists for children, and a scripted way to turn a reading list into a bookshelf available for reading online (via Rebecca’s portal) or offline (zipped up as an XO library bundle) for Gen XO.
A big thank you to the original developer of Gnubook, Raj Kumar – and all of the gang at the Internet Archive. Open Library is such a team effort, and there are so many talented people that work behind the scenes because they love what they do.
BTW – I donated XOs to the school and library in my town this year – and gave them a link to Open Library and the bookreader portal! 🙂