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elimu-ai / vitabu

📚 Android application for reading storybooks and expanding word vocabulary.
MIT License
3 stars 3 forks source link

Support arbitary epub or pdf? #91

Closed samuk closed 2 years ago

samuk commented 2 years ago

Hi I like this app. Is there a way to configure it to access .epubs or .pdf's on a given path?

My kids books are all in a folder on external sd. I'd like a folder browser so my users (parents) can configure the app to use that path once and then it can load all the books under that path/folder.

This is the current content https://rosettaphone.org/ although I plan to upgrade the kids sections to use https://digitallibrary.io/ content

nya-elimu commented 2 years ago

Hi, @samuk. No, this storybook app does not load .epub files directly. It fetches content from the elimu.ai Content Provider app. This means that the Vitabu app will not work as a standalone app, because it relies on the elimu.ai Content Provider to be installed.

Instead, the way it works is that we upload .epub files to our webapp where they are converted into our own custom storage format. And from there, the storybooks are downloaded to Android devices.

Screen Shot 2022-04-05 at 11 57 16 AM

See how Vitabu fits into the overall software architecture here: https://github.com/elimu-ai/wiki/blob/master/SOFTWARE_ARCHITECTURE.md

We do it this way because it makes it easier to clean up and improve ePUB storybooks that have been wrongly formatted/translated, etc. Also, this way makes it easier to collect learning analytics on how the children are interacting with content inside each book. And recording word-by-word highlighting while playing audio recordings becomes easier when having freedom to edit the content and source code of each book (although SMIL should theoretically work with original ePUB files as well).

samuk commented 2 years ago

OK that does sound reasoable. Although the epubs from https://digitallibrary.io/ are already good quality, so you could just use those.

I'm reluctant to use the rest of your ecosystem at this time as the other apps seem buggy/incomplete. I'll see if I can find the time up upload some digital library content to your webapp to test how that works.

nya-elimu commented 2 years ago

@samuk If you are looking for a user-friendly Android app for reading ePUB books, here is a good one: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.faultexception.reader

samuk commented 2 years ago

Thanks. It doesn't seem to be FOSS though. I need that to redistribute.

Using https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.foobnix.pro.pdf.reader/ It
has TTS/ read aloud & nice reflow for PDF. It's a little
overcomplicated though.

Quoting Nya Ξlimu @.***>:

@samuk If you are looking for a user-friendly Android app for
reading ePUB books, here is a good one:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.faultexception.reader

-- Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://github.com/elimu-ai/vitabu/issues/91#issuecomment-1089507301 You are receiving this because you were mentioned.

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