Activities
Read ETexts lets you read all the free e-texts from Project Gutenberg on your XO, or use Text to Speech to have them read to you. The built in offline catalog search lets you browse through and download over 24,000 great titles!
| Version | 19 |
|---|---|
| Works with | Sugar: 0.82 – 0.88 |
| Updated | March 13, 2010 |
| Developer | James Simmons |
| Homepage | http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Read_Etexts |
| Rating | Rated 5 out of 5 stars 2 reviews |
| Downloads | 59,008 |
More about this activity
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.
Reviews
Makes getting a wide range of Project Gutenberg ebook texts so much easier... A really nice improvement!
Rated 4 out of 5 stars by garycmartin on May 29, 2009
Excelent improvement!
One downside is that most of the books I found were in english. Are there any other book sources with more languages?
Rated 5 out of 5 stars by Tomeu on May 28, 2009
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Release Notes
Provides a new style toolbar for those versions of Sugar that support it (currently only Sugar on a Stick) and retains the old toolbar for older versions of Sugar. For most Gutenberg text the book text will be reformatted automatically to allow word wrapping. This will allow you to make fonts very large without cutting off any text, as the text will wrap to fit the new margins. Read Etexts will not convert the text of books that have excessively long paragraphs. These may be read without wrapping as before. Most texts will be converted.
