Johannesburg-based OpenLab International, which has operations in several African countries, has released a product designed to deliver a library of 10 000 virtual books and texts on a single DVD that will work on any PC running Windows or Linux.
OpenLab`s OpenBook is based on Project Gutenberg, which was initiated in 1971 to make freely available famous and important texts that are no longer limited by copyright. Project Gutenberg is the Internet`s oldest producer of electronic texts, with over 18 000 available online.
"OpenBook is aimed at making many of these texts available for education in Africa, where many people still lack the Internet connectivity or bandwidth necessary to access texts online," explains Denis Brandjes, OpenLab MD.
OpenBook is the latest product from OpenLab, and is being developed in line with the company`s philosophy of making technology available to education using available resources and without depending on high-speed Internet connectivity.
"We develop technology and applications to run in the simplest of hardware environments so the poorest of the poor might benefit from products that would satisfy the richest of the rich," says AJ Venter, OpenLab chief programmer.
In addition to making the texts available offline, OpenLab has packaged the texts along with an application for searching and sorting the DVD`s contents by author, title and file format, which may be plain text, HTML, or PDF.
Users with Internet access can also search the contents for specific quotes using a linkup with the open source WikiQuote project. Results from WikiQuote are compared with the contents of the DVD and matching texts are displayed to the user, says OpenLab.
OpenBook can be used directly from the DVD-ROM, but schools or institutions with limited DVD-ROMs also have the option of installing the application onto individual PCs if they have 8GB of disc space available or onto network servers.
"We can make education applications like OpenBook and EduKar, which runs on our OpenLab4 platform, available at a fraction of the cost of bespoke software because of our relatively low development costs through using open source software," says Brandjes.
OpenBook is available from OpenLab or one of its partners. According to Brandjes, a portion of the proceeds from all sales will go to Project Gutenberg.
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