Booki, OLPC and OER

You may be familiar with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. It’s pretty well known and aims to provide free laptops to children all over the world who otherwise could not afford them.

The OLPC is also a pretty good ebook reader, as demonstrated here:

eBook on the OLPC

The above image is taken from Reading and Sugar – an excellent manual by James Simmons about working with ebooks on the OLPC. The image shows a book taken from Archive.org and imported into Booki – Booki then exported this to an ePub and this was opened on the OLPC as shown.

In the same manual, James talks about using Booki on the OLPC to author ebooks. To quote James:

“Booki is one of the best tools available for Sugar users to create e-books.  It can be used on the XO or from Sugar on a Stick.  It supports many authors collaborating on a single book.  It supports translating books into many languages.  It can create PDFs and EPUBs.  It can create books formatted for print-on-demand services.  It can create documents in Open Office ODT format (which Open Office can convert to MS Word format).  It can even be used to download, proofread, and correct EPUBs created by the Internet Archive.

Booki is an excellent option for teachers preparing textbooks, but it can be used by students for their own projects too.”

Below is an image from the same manual showing Booki being used in the Browse activity (the OLPC browser).

Booki on the OLPC

We are hoping the good work James has been doing will help raise the awareness of Booki as a platform for book authoring on the OLPC which would open up the world of publishing considerably and (we hope) open up exciting possibilities for OER (Open Educational Resources)…