Digital contents

I browsed languages available at gutenberg.org and the picture is not brilliant.

1. 5 languages supported by DDL are not covered at gutenberg.org (Farsi, Ukranian, Latvian, Malay, Telugu). In this respect childrenslibrary.org is preferable

2. 8 languages covered not so widely - see below
Romanian 2 books 15 at childrenslibrary.org
Serbian 4 books 77 -
Czech 9 books 0
Russian 9 books 18
Norvegian 15 books 8
Hungarian 22 books 16
Polish 30 books 18
Swedish 68 books 8

total 159 160 (comparable)

So I think it make sense to include a link to gutenberg.org at language versions covered by gutenberg.org wide - the rest of languages not mentioned in my message.

Thanks for this interesting report on language covering.

The problem with childrenslibrary.org is that you cannot include their work in DDL, like I would like to do. Books are prisoners of their website, this is stipulated at the bottom of their FAQ (see http://en.childrenslibrary.org/help/faqs.shtml#C3), emphasis added:

“The ICDL seeks only the non-exclusive right to reproduce digital versions of the books and make them freely available for public display through the International Children’s Digital Library web site located at www.childrenslibrary.org.”

And also:

“The ICDL also employs technological measures that are designed to prevent the downloading, printing, and unauthorized further display and/or distribution of the books in the collection.”

This is not DDL compatible, unfortunately. This is why gutenberg.org is a much better options since we can include their books and derive them into illustrated stories or even comics.

Note that I don't think linking to such website is much interesting either, because it's quite difficult to find something if you don't know in advance what you're looking for. This is why embedding books in DDL seems more interesting as a first step. Later we could try to find a way to have it on the web too through a clear, easy to use online library.

I see and it make sense.
What I discovered is no Russian books from gutenberg is suitable for kids.
Possibly the situation is the same for other languages, we should check.
Basically I suppose it should be dedicated team responsible for selection of books for each language. It's quite a sensitive matters...

Yes I totally agree, I'm unable to choose for you for example. Unless we find translations of well-know stories, but even in this case we'd have to check translations are correct, not automated ones arranged by a non native speaker.

Of course we're not sure to find what we need on gutenberg.org, we have to start with what is available and search for other resources – or write some stories by ourselves :).

As indicated in #437, the site WikiSource is providing many more books in many more languages:

http://wikisource.org/wiki/Main_Page

Russian is included.