Greetings! It is #rdc2009 Hacker Wednesday, and this week we are exploring what formats are ideal to deliver public domain childrens books to the XO. As we mentioned in a previous blog post, storage is an issue on these little green laptops – so every bit counts. XO Generation 1.5 promises increased storage, but we want to make these books available to as broad an audience as possible. We have selected a target of 20 IACL books to estimate the per-page file size of each format provided by the Internet Archive (PDF, B/W PDF, DjVu, TXT). We will be posting these results as soon as they are available.

Obviously, TXT will be the winner when it comes to file size – but we know that younger kids want to see the pictures! So we are also exploring other formats, such as .CBZ which is a format that was designed for comic books. It is very similar to the format that the Internet Archive uses to serve up JPEG2 files in their new bookreader – but there is some conversion involved, and it may not be the most effective solution from a time and storage standpoint. The DjVu format is designed specifically for documents consisting of scanned book page – and since our target collection deals with childrens books where many are decorated or illustrated, this looks like the way to go. Many thanks to James Simmons for the helpful guidance he provided, sharing with us what he learned working with View Slides Activity.

We also have our eye on the future, so we are reading up on things like Open Publication Distribution System (OPDS) and EPUB. The future looks bright for ebooks!

We have our work cut out for us – it’s a fun challenge – and we like that at the Rural Design Collective!