[Textbook-l] Pratham Books; Open Access/Wiki Children's Books

[Kathy Pusztavari]

Hi everyone,

Does anyone know how Pratham is funding this?  I see that they are hiring
now.  Is Pratham funded by the Indian government?

-Kathy 

-----Original Message-----
From: textbook-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:textbook-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Magnus Manske
Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2008 1:39 AM
To: Wikimedia textbook discussion
Subject: Re: [Textbook-l] Pratham Books; Open Access/Wiki Children's Books

On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 3:49 AM, Gautam John <gautam at prathambooks.org>
wrote:
> Hello List,
>
>  I got here via Erik at the WM Foundation.
>
>  I'm working with Pratham Books [1] and we're a non-profit children's  
> book publishing house that seeks to put a book in every child's hand.
>  To further this goal, we are in the process of developing a reading  
> portal for India, on the lines of the water portal [2] that we hope  
> will ultimately be the de facto repository of information related to  
> children's books in India.
>
>  An integral part of this portal is a wiki-like platform where we hope  
> to upload all of our books, close to 1000 of them, and allow them to  
> be translated and edited and downloaded in high and lo res PDF's by  
> users. The goal of this project is to untie distribution of the books  
> from the physical medium to further our mission, as mentioned  
> previously.
>
>  However, given that it's children's books, maintaining and preserving  
> the layout of the books, the pictures with respect to the text, is  
> crucially important. We also contemplate uploading blank templates, of  
> only the layout and pictures, for people to use to write their own  
> stories.
>
>  A few areas we're looking for assistance are:
>
>  User Interface
>
>  Given the nature of the content we're seeking to create and enable 
> use  and re-use of , the ease of use and the intuitiveness of the UI 
> will  be crucial in building support from a user base.
>
>  Platform Design
>
>  Ideally, we'd like the platform to conform to the same standards that  
> the project does of being open, free and modifiable. However, the  
> deeper technical issues are, at this point, a little beyond our scope  
> of abilities.
>
>  Community Building
>
>  In particular, building an active and engaged community around the  
> idea and the content will define whether this platform works. Also,  
> issues and processes for moderation and administration from within the  
> community.
>
>  I look forward to hearing from you.

Well, if layout is important, the best option might be to upload an SVG file
per book page.
* High quality
* Free editing software available (e.g.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkscape )
* Upload on MediaWiki sites supports versions, deletions, undeletions

One wouldn't be able to directly edit the pages online.
But, organisation, discussion, preview layouts etc could still be done
inside the Wiki.
There are quite a few SVG-to-PDF converters out there, so a script could
generate PDFs from the SVG files automatically, maybe using an image list
and formatting options stored on Wiki pages.

Cheers,
Magnus

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