The RDC created these bookmarks for our 2007 BookMobile Tour. Design by Levi Thompson

Greetings! We had a great #rdc2009 Hacker Wednesday – we successfully downloaded our target collection of books in DjVu format, and took a close look at the current state-of-the-art in bundle creation and content collections at http://wiki.laptop.org/. We realize that what we are trying to do is somewhat ambitious, so we are trying to manage our own expectations.

The first order of business was registering our developer keys with the OLPC. We want to upgrade our current base of XOs to support the DjVu format, and it appears we need to upgrade to Sugar on a Stick (SoaS) .84 to improve performance (hat tip: James Simmons and Sayamindu Dasgupta). We will be updating several of our OLPC laptops to support this feature. We are currently conducting research to see if there is any way to auto-update the XOs that boot from the sticks to make integration of the DjVu format into the default Read.Activity easier.

We also spent some time setting up our XO Computer Lab at 246 6th Street (photos forthcoming!) so we can start sharing our work in progress with visitors to our studio. Today marks the designated halfway point in our program, but we are having so much fun working together and coming up with so many cool ideas that we decided to extend our own deadline until October so we can take our time and deliver a great product … plus share our discoveries with our friends in the area. We still have several laptops to retrieve – and given this is the summer months that makes this aspect of the project quite difficult! Our fallback plan is to make sticks for all 12 laptops (six granted from the OLPC, and six we donated in our local area) – but ideally we would like to meetup with everyone nearby with an XO to share our work and show them how to work with the collection.

So, our plan moving forward is to bundle the IACL collection in as many usable formats as feasible, providing a plan for graceful degradation – we know that the PDF format works in the current XO-1 bookreader on default, DjVu requires an upgrade to an XO-1, and EPUB is the wave of the future. We are starting work on mockups for a web user interface for the IACL collection, plus helping Steven map out a plan for the release of his auto-downloader program.

The excitement continues at the RDC!