We had a productive #rdc2009 Hacker Wednesday on-site at 246/Point B Studio. Steven and Scotty are plugging away, writing a Python app to download the books we need for the XOs. Ideally, we want to store these books as a collection or list that everyone can share on the web. We are also calculating how much space these books are going to occupy – we will definitely need to supplement the capacity of the XO-1s we received from the OLPC, since that is the user base we are targeting. Sugar-on-a-Stick definitely looks like the optimal solution for this phase of the project.

We all agreed that the best plan is to deliver the bundles as DjVu so we can use the native bookreader (with some possible enhancements – more on that later), but create a target collection of 20 or so books as a research experiment for future development with EPUB. So, Levi and I are currently building a subset of those books that are an accurate representation of the different formats popular for children’s books (heavily illustrated, large type, poetry, etc). Then, we plan to experiment with mark-up. These books will be culled from our target IACL collection. EPUB is not fully supported at this time in the XO Read Activity – but we want to be ready when it is!

We are on target for our proposed deadline, Labor Day Weekend – you can see a very rough overview here – we have a more detailed production schedule that we will be posting soon.