Read Etexts is similar to the original Read activity, but instead of PDFs this activity works with the plain text files created for Project Gutenberg. This lets you read tens of thousands of great books in several languages for free. Because the plain text format is so simple to create you might also use Read Etexts for text files you create yourself, like class handouts, etc. Read Etexts has a Text to Speech feature with highlighting of each word as it is spoken. It requires a gstreamer plugin for espeak that currently is included in Sugar on a Stick and will be included with other future versions of Sugar. If you don't have this plugin installed you will not see the Speech toolbar tab but the Activity will be useable for all other functions.

New with version 11 there is a Books toolbar that lets you search the Project Gutenberg offline catalog. Using the search you can select and download a large collection of etexts in minutes. The Journal entries created by this feature have the Read Etexts icon and an be opened with one click.

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Developer Comments

On some computers, generally less powerful ones, running Sugar on a Stick Text to Speech with highlighting doesn't work well. Highlighting lags behind the words being spoken. On the same computer where Sugar is installed on the hard drive highlighting may work perfectly well.

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Version 27 — January 25, 2016 — 1,448 KB

Correct speech logic, accelerator key for Stop button, update built in book catalog.

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