Standard Ebooks: liberated ebooks, carefully produced for the true book lover

https://standardebooks.org

by tosh • 1 year ago

1213 231 1 year ago

standardebooks.org

smallnix• 1 year ago

Awesome project. Gutenberg is mentioned, does this project feed back to Gutenberg?

aegypti• 1 year ago

Absolutely, from a previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32217313

miles2• 1 year ago

As the linked comment says, it's up to the individual contributor to inform PG of any corrections; SE does not do so as a matter of course (at least, that was the case when I last contributed).

opto• 1 year ago

Looks like a great project, and one sorely needed by people like me who find themselves trying to get hold of old books they can't get in their local library and that are too expensive to buy secondhand.

carlosjobim5• 1 year ago

The shadow libraries such as Anna's Archive are a treasure trove of old books, and you're not breaking any imaginary law by downloading old books which are out of copyright.

zozbot2343• 1 year ago

If a book is out of copyright you can usually find the scan on Internet Archive. No need to look elsewhere at all.

charcircuit2• 1 year ago

The scans can have a different copyright date than the book itself.

mariusor• 1 year ago

As far as I know Standard gets their raw ebooks from Project Gutenberg which has a vastly greater collection of public domain works. What they're doing is typesetting them for the average reader. But if all you're looking for is just the content, Gutenberg is the place to look for ethically clean copies.

HexPhantom5• 1 year ago

Tracking down older or out-of-print books can be weirdly frustrating, especially when prices for secondhand copies get absurd

LordGronk• 1 year ago

I would love this if it were to produce viable unabridged ebooks of Francis Parkman’s “France and England in North America” vol 2-7. All the existent digital editions were poorly scanned and don’t separate footnotes from the main text.

poidos• 1 year ago

If you have the cash, you can pay them to do so! Scroll down to “SPONSOR A NEW EBOOK”:

https://standardebooks.org/donate

Sponsoring a new ebook of your choice calls for a donation of $900 + $0.02 per word over the first 100,000

squigz• 1 year ago

I love this project and don't want to disparage the work that goes into it, but 900 USD, and it has to be a book that is already transcribed online? That seems a bit much to me.

acabal18• 1 year ago

You can also join our Patrons Circle to have this book added to our Wanted Ebooks list, which is a list of suggestions for our volunteers to work on: https://standardebooks.org/donate#patrons-circle

tailspin2019• 1 year ago

I love this. They pay attention to everything I normally despise about (many) ebooks (poor layout, lack of metadata, no chapter headings etc).

jimnotgym• 1 year ago

Is there anything similar for Audiobooks (which I wish would go back to being called Talking Books)

kybernetikos• 1 year ago

Librivox https://librivox.org/ is the closest I know.

cdrini• 1 year ago

I would also recommend using Microsoft Edge's built-in ReadAloud (TTS) on standard ebooks. They have a mind boggling number of hyper realistic voices; more than any other browser I've tested.

mentalgear• 1 year ago

Beautifully made! Which gutenberg.org would be updated with this design & approach!

ssttoo2• 1 year ago

I recently started on my first title contribution to the project, it’s a rewarding experience https://github.com/stoyan/edith-wharton_the-custom-of-the-co... It’s HTML all the way down

The step-by-step: https://standardebooks.org/contribute/producing-an-ebook-ste...

In a nutshell: start with a Project Gutenberg text, clean it up to a high standard, have it peer reviewed and published

Touche• 1 year ago

Love this. So many in the archivist community are only interested in preservation and don't care at all about making the material accessible. Love to see a project like this prioritizing the latter.

stog2• 1 year ago

You’re spot on with this. I recently converted a local history book from 1911 to Markdown, ePub and HTML and tracked the changes on GitHub. Only a handful of copies of this book exist in physical form and it has been photo copied (which is great).

However, I was completely shot down by the local library when I was discussing it with them. They said they already had a photo copy and didn’t need anymore digital editions, I tried to explain the benefits of having it in a machine readable format but they wouldn’t entertain it. I completed the project for me, so I wasn’t too bothered, but thought they might have been interested in archiving it but they weren’t.

My general feeling is that they didn’t like an outsider contributing and touching on a format they didn’t know so got slightly defensive.

frereubu6• 1 year ago

Do you "claim" a book, to make sure that no-one else is trying to work on the same book? I presume that's part of step 4 in your link, given that it would be heartbreaking to get 90% of the way through and then be beaten to it by someone who'd started at roughly the same time!

contact987919• 1 year ago

Yes, you signal your intent on the mailing list subject to approval by the editor-in-chief

pidgeon_lover4• 1 year ago

I am interested in ebook production, as I do so for my own personal use, but the copyright issues put me off contributing on the clearnet to legit projects. I have a whole section in my Calibre library of books I've edited or converted from Archive.org scans, but can't share any of them because a) legit channels only accept public domain works, and they're all under copyright, and b) the current main ebook pirate channels don't accept any contributions

miles2• 1 year ago

Some of the higher ranking previous discussions:

2017, 441 points, 97 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14570035

2019, 820 points, 131 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20594802

2022, 1578 points, 256 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32215324

2024, 701 points, 154 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38831219

kpjas• 1 year ago

How about https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Main_Page ?

grues-dinner2• 1 year ago

It's not very obvious, but Wikisource provides EPUBs via the Tools menu for every book.

BoingBoomTschak• 1 year ago

What a great project! This should really be funded by states, states which often already have some money dedicated to the preservation of culture.

Too bad most stuff I really like will never enter the public domain in my lifetime... well, paper and the high seas still exist!

contact987919• 1 year ago

its never too late to expand your "stuff I really like" further into the public domain!

there are whole generations of wonderful and insightful works that essentially disappeared from present consciousness for no reason other than for being old

thfuran• 1 year ago

It would be better to expand the public domain. Whole generations of works were stolen by extensions of copyright.

Sverigevader• 1 year ago

It's thanks to this site that I learned that Kobo uses a really bad renderer for epubs unless converted to their own ebook format (Kepub). It make a huge difference in appearance and performance on a Kobo device.

https://standardebooks.org/help/how-to-use-our-ebooks#kobo-f...

RVuRnvbM2e• 1 year ago

Wow I never knew this!

robin_reala6• 1 year ago

Yeah, if you just load normal epubs it defaults to an old version of Adobe Digital Editions unfortunately.

crtasm• 1 year ago

I assume KOReader has a better renderer for epub but will have to test how it compares to the stock software+kepub. So far I've only used KOReader on my device.

contact987919• 1 year ago

the only issues i've found with koreader is its default margin size and its display of standard ebooks' titlepages but (I believe) these can be fixed with a fairly simple user tweaks css

stog2• 1 year ago

I discovered this too. However, I now use Plato Reader on my Kobo with standard ePub and it’s lovely.

Uvix• 1 year ago

You don't even have to convert it, just rename the extension to .kepub.epub. https://github.com/kobolabs/epub-spec?tab=readme-ov-file#sid...

acabal18• 1 year ago

This is not entirely correct - Kobo also expects a bunch of special <span>s inserted for things like highlighting and page numbers to work.

It kills me that Kobo is so close to having plain epubs rendered with Webkit but for some reason they just won't take the leap!

lazyeye• 1 year ago

You can use kepubify to convert epubs to kepubs (and calibre will do this as well)

https://pgaskin.net/kepubify/

_shantaram• 1 year ago

And https://send.djazz.se automatically performs the conversion for you with kepubify and sends it to your ereader! No affiliation, just a happy camper chiming in

coopykins• 1 year ago

I found curious that if you order the books by reading difficulty (easier to harder) The sound and the fury is on the second place.

acabal18• 1 year ago

We use the Flesch-Kincaid algorithm to calculate reading ease. For most books it works pretty well, but for avant-garde prose like The Sound and the Fury it fails pretty badly. It also considers Ulysses to be "fairly easy"!

acabal18• 1 year ago

Editor-in-chief here, happy to answer any questions, as always. We also recently celebrated Public Domain Day with an especially notable crop of books, including The Sound and the Fury, All Quiet on the Western Front, John Steinbeck's first novel, some Hemingway, Gandhi, two Dashiell Hammett novels, and more: https://standardebooks.org/blog/public-domain-day-2025

Erlangen• 1 year ago

Hi, Alex. Is there anyway to browser the ebooks filtered by languages? I tried to find some texts in French, but it doesn't seem to have any.

LtWorf• 1 year ago

Same for me. I think it's english only.

acabal18• 1 year ago

Standard Ebooks only works on English-language books, as typography varies between languages and we're only experts in English.

loloquwowndueo4• 1 year ago

Which ebook reader works well with standard ebooks in 2025?

(More concretely my reader is a 2nd-gen kindle which is basically useless these days and I’d love an idea of something that can display standard ebooks with all their advanced formatting)

Thanks!

wyclif3• 1 year ago

A Kobo would be a great choice. I use a Kobo Libra 2 and love it a lot more than my old Kindle Paperwhite that got stolen: https://gl.kobobooks.com/products/kobo-libra-2 The Kobo Sage is also good because it has an 8" screen.

Standard eBooks offers kepub format for Kobo devices and files, they use their advanced Webkit-based renderer: https://standardebooks.org/help/how-to-use-our-ebooks#kobo-f...

acabal18• 1 year ago

I read on an old Kobo, using Kepub files. Their Kepub renderer is quite good.

I think Kindle's renderer hasn't changed significantly for many years, and it had always been pretty bad. I always say that Kindle seems to have been created by people who hate books.

The best renderer around is iBooks on an iPad, which as far as I can tell uses an up-to-date Webkit.

turrican• 1 year ago

A note for Kobo users: a lot of us (myself included) use Calibre to manage and upload our ebooks. Something about Calibre messes up Kepub files and strips out a lot of the formatting (including the book’s cover).

If I want to appreciate a nice Kepub from Standard Ebooks, I upload it directly to the Kobo.

kps• 1 year ago

Piggybacking: for computers, what is a good epub viewer?

What I'm personally looking for:

- Linux and/or OS X

- No ‘import’ requirement (a viewer, not a collection manager)

- Single page or continuous (no forced double spread)

- No required animations

- At least basic control over font size, spacing, margins.

- Keyboard navigation (at least next/previous page)

carlosjobim5• 1 year ago

My Kindle is 8 years old and works excellent with standard ebooks. I think you can select any device that you prefer and it will be good.

rodolphoarruda• 1 year ago

For Android, Moon Reader Pro.

Unmatched UI tweaking features which make reading a pleasure. Syncs bookmarks with cloud services, thus across different devices.

jussih• 1 year ago

I recently purchased a Pocketbook Era. It is pretty much the perfect device for me - supports open standards and does not require any cloud account signups to start using it. It is not hostile to the user, 3rd party applications such as Koreader can be simply dropped in and they appear in the menus without any shenanigans like jailbreaking or custom launchers needed.

In my ideal world all devices would be like this.

pidgeon_lover4• 1 year ago

KOReader for Kindle? https://github.com/koreader/koreader

It does a good job of modernising old Kindles.

bodantogat• 1 year ago

Is there an API or downloadable catalog of the titles? Happy to feature them on meetnewbooks.com so more readers can find them.

acabal18• 1 year ago

Yes, we have complete feeds available for our Patrons: https://standardebooks.org/feeds

sbarre• 1 year ago

What's the point of including books that aren't public domain yet in your collections?

It makes it hard to browse those collections to find actual books to read. The first 3 series I clicked on all said "not P.D." (which at first I didn't know what "P.D" meant - remember your audience does not have your level of familiarity with your context, perhaps a tooltip on that badge would help)..

Then I see "this book will enter public domain in 2050"..

I commend you for this project, it's really awesome work.. From a user's experience, it would be great to have a filter on your various lists that restricts only to books that are available, and excludes these books that are not yet in your collection.

robin_reala6• 1 year ago

Whenever we add a collection, the books that are in that collection but not yet in PD in the US get placeholders. But a filter might not be a bad idea.

acabal18• 1 year ago

In addition to what Robin mentioned below, some of these placeholders are for books on our Wanted list. I also think it's useful to show readers that particular books are looking for volunteers to produce, and also to show that some books they might want are locked away by copyright for possibly decades. In that sense it's partly a political message.

frereubu6• 1 year ago

I love this. However, I couldn't find an alphabetical list of authors, which is the way I wanted to browse on my first visit. Instead my only option is to show 48 on a page and paginate through, which is tedious. I know there are author pages - e.g. https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/william-makepeace-thackera... - so I presume it's feasible. An author index would significantly increase my likelihood of understanding what's available and engaging with the content.

acabal18• 1 year ago

We don't have a list of authors yet, but that's a good idea to add!

homebrewer• 1 year ago

https://standardebooks.org/bulk-downloads/authors

Links in the first column.

frereubu6• 1 year ago

Another question - in https://standardebooks.org/contribute/producing-an-ebook-ste... you talk about "modernising" spelling, e.g. changing "some one" to "someone". This may be against the implicit goal of making these accessible for a general reader, but I prefer to read what was originally written, and it feels like it crosses a line into editorialising rather than letting the original feel stand as-is. (Although of course these texts have already been "editorialised" by their original editors!) Totally your decision given the amount of effort that has clearly gone into this, but I'd be interested to read the rationale for that decision.

acabal18• 1 year ago

That's fine! Our editions didn't erase any of the other editions you can find online and in print. You're more than welcome to select any edition that fits your reading preferences.

idoubtit• 1 year ago

I respect this choice of modernization, and I suppose some readers enjoy it, but it makes the publisher's whole work useless to me. When a text has been altered, I can't trust it respects the intent of the author, and any style inconsistency I find may be a by-product of the publisher's mangling.

So, when I care about a book, I never read Standard Ebooks' edition.

By the way, the modernization is more than joining a few words. Sometimes, Standard Ebooks replaces the word used at the time the book was written. For instance:

    This time, however, the mountain was going to [-Mahomet;-]{+Muhammad;+}

The previous quote is from Galsworthy's "Forsyte Saga". The author used many French words and French spellings – like "Tchekov" for the Russian playwriter that was living in Paris. These subtleties are lost with the modernization.

I also think some alterations are plain mistakes. For instance in the same book:

    if she wanted a good book she should read [-“Job”-]{+Job+};
    his father was rather like Job while Job still had land.

greenie_beans• 1 year ago

ooo tempted to reprint faulkner as part of a small press, thanks for the idea

fauria• 1 year ago

Roughly speaking, how long does it take you to produce a single ebook?

contact987919• 1 year ago

it varies widely depending on the length and type of book and how much free time the volunteer has to devote to it

Anywhere between 1 week for the simplest (straight narrative, not too much verse or endnotes) and ~1 year (thousands of endnotes, pages of verse, drama, in-line references to book titles, use of technical terms, etc)

acabal18• 1 year ago

Once you're very familiar with the process, you could get a draft of a basic prose novel ready for proofreading in a few hours. Then it has to be proofread and completed.

Beginners, and people working on more advanced books, can take much, much, much longer.

htunnicliff• 1 year ago

I’d love to know more about the pattern of keeping each book in individual repos, rather than in a singular repo.

remus• 1 year ago

Presumably to keep the repo size reasonable. Say I want to make an ad hoc contribution to a book, if step 1 is "download this multi-gigabyte repo" then that's a fairly big hurdle.

acabal18• 1 year ago

Each repo is a history of the ebook including editorial changes, typos fixes, and the like. Having a single repo containing thousands of ebooks and their histories would be pretty annoying to browse.

jayanmn• 1 year ago

I am from India. Could you add local UPI based donation option at some point? Not everyone has card here.

mourner• 1 year ago

Wonderful project! One thing I wish the website would have is being able to find the right book to read out of this enormous list — e.g. showing / sorting by Goodreads ratings (which I realize you might not want to do), or at least having some kind of a "Featured" section with the most critically acclaimed / must read books of the project on one page.

cxr3• 1 year ago

There are around a dozen collections on the (not prominently featured) collections page[1] like Le Monde's 100 Best Books of the Century and Modern Library's 100 Best Novels, etc.

1. <https://standardebooks.org/collections>

theyinwhy• 1 year ago

Great work! Gutenberg project books have always been a pain to read. Thank you for caring!

agiacalone• 1 year ago

Been using Standard Ebooks for a while now, but wanted to drop by here and say how great this site is! It's replaced P.G. for me (for whatever is on this site, at least) and I like the much nicer formatting on the texts. It's great on both my physical Kindle and Apple Books on my iPhone.

crorella• 1 year ago

In your opinion, what is the ebook reader you like the most ?

sgustard• 1 year ago

Steinbeck was the first name I searched for, so this was great to see even if his major works won't be available for some time. I do wonder how badly the Steinbeck or Faulkner estates are hurt by the sudden loss of royalties? Imagine working hard to write a book to make a living and then just under a hundred years it's taken away from you. Also, AI.

HexPhantom5• 1 year ago

Really appreciate the work Standard Ebooks puts into making these texts not just available, but readable

virtualritz3• 1 year ago

That website is hopefully not an indication of how these ebooks will look on my mobile.

A screenshot from the typography section:

https://ibb.co/nqhyTR3M

contact987919• 1 year ago

if you're reading a style manual it might :)

but no, the manual itself is not really mobile-friendly. you can check what an actual ebook would look like though:

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/louis-couperus/the-tour/al...

virtualritz3• 1 year ago

Much too tight leading for a book text.

This is a leading you'd see on the ingredients list of an energy bar packaging.

The other choices are fine.

Caveat: I studied typography and worked in that field for a decade.

acabal18• 1 year ago

The manual has some known issues on mobile, I believe there's a GitHub issue open about it. It's low priority because the manual is rarely read on mobile. PRs welcomed!

Animats• 1 year ago

Most of the big print-on-demand companies will now make hardcovers, for about $10. You can't feed raw Gutenberg files into those mills, but these "standard ebooks" have enough formatting info for that. So that would be a useful service.

m-hodges• 1 year ago

What are some examples of companies that do this?

pmarreck3• 1 year ago

It surprises me that the eBook (clarification: epub) format is basically XHTML because 1) that means that every eReader needs to basically be a web browser 2) this sounds like it would make reformatting for different devices NOT easier

contact987919• 1 year ago

this also somewhat surprised me at first but I think it's obvious in hindsight, though they don't have to be a full-blown web browser (you can go read the epub specs at W3C to see what's supported)

as for (2) I'm not sure why you think it would make it less easier? being html, text reflows automatically based on screen size, font size, line height, etc

pmarreck3• 1 year ago

I guess I assumed that, for example, multi device support on websites for various device widths entails a bunch of CSS, which means the epub renderer would have to also do that, which basically means a whole web browser.

also that things like footnotes or anything that has a floating reference (table of contents links for example) might get very complex or require javascript

badsectoracula• 1 year ago

Yeah (i guess you mean epub), though in practice readers support only a tiny subset and epubs avoid using anything fancier than basic XHTML. Epubs that try to use fancy stuff (like most CSS outside of setting fonts - that readers can ignore either because they do not support it, or because the user wants to use another font) tend to not display correctly.

acabal18• 1 year ago

It makes a lot of sense when you recall that HTML and its ancestors were designed to mark up and format documents, i.e. books. One of the most fundamental elements is <p>, which stands for... paragraph.

Each renderer differs in capabilities, and most are stuck in a subset of early-2000s capabilities, so designing an ebook is very much like designing for the 90s era web. Lots of hacks are required to get the same file to look good on many different renderers, and achieving that is one of the goals of Standard Ebooks.

hombre_fatal3• 1 year ago

Including a web browser seems a lot easier and simpler than coming up with your own rendering system once you want to support a feature set past the trivial.

Also, xhtml is just markup. It doesn’t mean you have to support all the possible tags and styles of modern html and css. It would be a sensible choice even if you had basic needs. You just parse it into whatever representation you want.

berkes• 1 year ago

Also, xhtml is just markup.

And so it's not a programming language runtime (i.e. javascript or wasm), nor a css renderer, nor a bunch of web-apis.

It's these things, not the (X)HTML parsing and rendering that makes a browser the complex thing it is.

carlosjobim5• 1 year ago

The greatest surprise is that no popular web browser opens ePubs natively! This in 2025, where they all display PDFs, high resolution video, 3D games, etc.

robin_reala6• 1 year ago

Edge used to, until MS rebuilt it on top of Chromium. Shame.

cxr3• 1 year ago

A bigger surprise (failure) is that the EPUB folks have continued to evolve their bespoke format instead of ditching it for something that legacy browsers already know how to handle. An "EPUB" should just be a Mac-style bundle (i.e. a directory) with an XHTML file in it written to conform to a specific metadata profile.

sandreas• 1 year ago

What I'm missing in modern ebooks (like epub format) is more metadata. Who's talking (character data)? What emotional aspects does the scene have (angry, happy, sad, in a hurry)? Where does the conversation take place (geodata)?

I'd love to see at least:

  - character: ID, Name, Gender, Age
  - mood: ID, Name (Happy, Sad, Angry, ...)
  - place: ID, Name, Acoustic (Outside, Inside, Cave, ...)

This could be prepared by the author, work as a glossary, enrich the whole ebook experience and also would be a great preparation to teach AI voices how to convert a book into an audiobook.

acabal18• 1 year ago

TEI is something like that, but the amount of effort required to mark a book up like that would be astronomical.

xondono• 1 year ago

Starts to sound like the kind of task an AI could do reasonably well though

hombre_fatal3• 1 year ago

If it can be derived from the book text, then LLMs or reader can already derive it.

If it can’t be derived from the book text, then it’s extra content that probably shouldn’t be there because it came from elsewhere.

huhkerrf• 1 year ago

What's the point of reading a book, then? The joy of reading fiction is to try to understand the humanity in the scene. I don't need the author to force feed me all of these details. I want to wrestle with the answers, to try to grasp what it might mean.

mjmas2• 1 year ago

That sounds like you are asking for a play.

HexPhantom5• 1 year ago

The challenge would be balancing that metadata richness without turning the book into a spreadsheet, but if done well (maybe opt-in layers or a toggle), it could really deepen the experience

llm_nerd• 1 year ago

A good initiative, but the "us vs them" framing — where the "them" are other people trying to do a service for people — gives off bad juju. It positions the value proposition by seemingly denigrating other providers of free ebooks.

It begins with "Other free ebooks don’t put much effort into..." which sounds extremely catty.

Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but it seems there's a way to stand on other people's shoulders and celebrate each other.

zestyping2• 1 year ago

Agreed.

kseistrup• 1 year ago

I love Standard Ebooks.

See also Global Grey ebooks: https://www.globalgreyebooks.com/ One woman has formatted hundreds of ebooks herself.

konstantinua00• 1 year ago

Forbidden You don't have permission to access this resource.

thanks for being open ...I guess

generationP2• 1 year ago

You're probably in some country that has longer copyright duration than the US (life+70a, which is atrocious enough). Use Tor or a proxy.

SamBam3• 1 year ago

Are there any non-English books? When I go to the search page, language isn't even a pull-down option, so I'm guessing not.

There is a huge world of out-of-copyright non-English texts, and Project Gutenberg has many thousands of them. I wonder if any interest could be generated to help bring them in by posting on foreign language subreddits or something.

slevis• 1 year ago

Just looked through the entire website to answer this question. Seems like they only accept english books :( "Types of ebooks we don’t accept: - Non-English-language books. Translations to English are, of course, OK." (https://standardebooks.org/contribute/collections-policy)

SamBam3• 1 year ago

Weird. Why the explicit rule against them?

I understand if the existing editors can't personally proofread the submissions, but that's why peer-review exists. Or an open-source project in general where people can post corrections. Jimbo Wales didn't need to speak a hundred languages to launch Wikipedia.

amelius• 1 year ago

Do they use AI tools in their conversion workflow?

contact987919• 1 year ago

No, LLMs are not used (nor would they be allowed). As for whether you would consider OCR to be AI, then... possibly?

UncleEntity• 1 year ago

Does it use any automation?

My bro-in-law supported his family as a freelance editor for years while my sister was doing the "maternity leave" thing so I know there's a non-trivial amount of work that goes into book editing. Cutting out some of that human labor seems like a good thing for a volunteer project.

kelvinjps102• 1 year ago

Sorry for the question but how behind are the LLMs in terms of quality for something like this?

tcoff913• 1 year ago

For those who are into ebooks and audiobooks, I’ve been having a blast with the app Storyteller: https://storyteller-platform.gitlab.io/storyteller/

You can self host the server, and it will create epub3s with the audiobook and ebook synced up.

Then you use the mobile app to listen and read the books. It works way better than whispersync from kindle.

Read on your boox e reader then switch to your phone and listen and everything syncs up seamlessly.

tass• 1 year ago

Where do you find the books to host?

Also your link has an erroneous .com

tcoff913• 1 year ago

You can get drm free audiobooks from libro and you can strip drm from kindle and audible books with calibre and libation.

pidgeon_lover4• 1 year ago

At first glance, the favicon/logo looks like the poop emoji, rather than a bonfire haha

rr808• 1 year ago

I like the idea. I read a bunch of classics from Gutenberg. In reality so many old books are very long and boring I ended up getting more modern books from the library instead.

Maybe TikTok ruined me but maybe these things really do literally have a shelf life. Hopefully reformatting will help. Perhaps a better way to review and find the gems would be most helpful..

TomasBM• 1 year ago

Perhaps it's not just about the 'shelf life' of a book, but also the language and style they use. The more archaic the language, and the more distant the style that the author's use, the harder it is for me to focus on the book.

Perhaps it would be useful to have expertly abridged and modernized versions of (e)books, with interpreter's notes for each change.

zozbot2343• 1 year ago

Perhaps it would be useful to have expertly abridged and modernized versions of (e)books, with interpreter's notes for each change.

A good AI can do this for you nowadays. So if anything it's nice to have the original version available.

dr_dshiv• 1 year ago

Did you ever consider making them public domain but still offering to charge optional $10 donation for download?

I’m interested in a similar approach for a rare book library, but funding for staff is a really challenge so we want to make some kind of revenue stream.

contact987919• 1 year ago

Standard Ebooks grew out of a pay-what-you-want experiment that Alex did ~10 years ago

MilnerRoute• 1 year ago

Another great ebook/volunteer project is Librivox - free public-domain audiobooks read by volunteers around the world...

https://librivox.org/

tcoff913• 1 year ago

You can pair these together with the Storyteller app to create an epub3 with the audio embedded and aligned to have a whispersync-esque experience

reassess_blind• 1 year ago

A sort by popularity filter would be appreciated.

jomohke• 1 year ago

Some places resist this because it causes a "rich get richer" effect in popularity. But it's admittedly convenient.

fuddle• 1 year ago

It would be great to be able to sort by popularity, to make it easier to find popular books. Or have a list of top 100 downloads.

dalanmiller• 1 year ago

I love Standard Ebooks! It is such a treasure! Currently enjoying Cup of Gold by John Steinbeck.

Thank you to everyone who helps put this together!

fernly2• 1 year ago

A bit of context regarding Project Gutenberg. Its intake process is far from casual. Take a look at Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders (PGDP, [0],[1]), one of the oldest "crowd-sourcing" projects on the net (est. 2000). As you can see from [0], every book goes through three rounds of proofing, where volunteers read each page of text and compare it to the scanned image; then through two rounds of format review, where other volunteers insert or review format markup.

From that 5-pass process the marked-up text is handed to a volunteer "post-processor" who assembles the final HTML or e-book file; then the completed book gets one more "smooth reading" pass before it is posted to PG.

This it the process that produces the books input to Standard Ebooks. That they can still find scanner errors ("tne" for "the", a typical "scanno") demonstrates how difficult it is to see those. But their presence isn't from carelessness or disregard for the value of the books.

In the 20-teens I put in hundreds of volunteer hours at PGDP in all the above roles, and it was very satisfying work. I'd recommend it to anyone wanting an online hobby that feels constructive. Volunteering time to Standard Ebooks would probably feel good as well.

[0] https://www.pgdp.net/c/activity_hub.php

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Proofreaders

contact987919• 1 year ago

The work done by Distributed Proofreaders is pretty amazing. I try to contribute my 35 pages as often as I can. The backlog there is pretty insane even while finishing upwards of 150 ebooks per month

it truly is an "online hobby that feels constructive". you get these tiny glimpses into our shared literary/cultural history while knowing that the work you're doing is for the benefit of all (benefit of the public domain)

zozbot2343• 1 year ago

The backlog there is pretty insane even while finishing upwards of 150 ebooks per month

Isn't the backlog there mostly in the post-processing step, though? To the point where they're taking finished texts and running them again through the page-by-page proofreading in hope of fishing out more OCR typos and improving the format markup?

You can also contribute at Wikisource if you prefer, that doesn't really have a post-processing step and has much less of a fixed pipeline. (There are explicit "proofreading" and "verification" steps per page, but not much beyond that.)

zem2• 1 year ago

out of curiosity, wouldn't an automated spell check pass help catch ocr errors? e.g. "tne" would be caught immediately.

generationP2• 1 year ago

The most confusing errors are the ones spellcheck doesn't catch because they transform a word into a valid word. But it's them that we want the least.

contact987919• 1 year ago

the distributed proofreaders process does include a mandatory spellcheck

pulkitsh1234• 1 year ago

An LLM-based spellchecker would've caught it for sure. I am working on one here: https://github.com/pulkitsharma07/spelltastic.io, If anyone has suggestions on how this can help in Project Gutenberg / Standard Ebook's workflows, please reach out to me / open an issue.

I have seen that LLMs are pretty good at understanding context/domain / theme-specific terms, so their spellchecking is pretty good.

bluGill• 1 year ago

Unless tne is an abbreviation and so it should pass. Names are a common place where people make up weird spellings and so spell checkers are annoying. I have terrible spelling, and yet most of the time I run spellcheck it is tripping up on words that are spelled correct but not in the dictionary (in large part because I run spell check after each revision: words spelled wrong . Add to dictionary means that my dictionary is polluted with words that only apply to one document and would be wrong in the next)

fernly2• 1 year ago

Running spellcheck is a standard step on every page of proofreading. There's a "wordcheck" button in proofing UI.

Arcorann• 1 year ago

In a similar vein, there is Wikisource.[0] Wikisource has the advantage of allowing for extensive formatting to closely match the source works due to its wiki-based format, but doesn't have quite as robust processes. Its flexibility is unparalleled though -- it covers virtually any form of scanned print work and even some old movies, and contributors can focus on whatever niches they're interested in if they want.

[0] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Main_Page

grues-dinner2• 1 year ago

doesn't have quite as robust processes

They do have a double-pass system for all works based on scanned pages, which is quite nifty. Green means two passes complete: https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:Sophocles%27_King_Oed...

Plus you can just jump in to any work, in true wiki fashion.

HexPhantom5• 1 year ago

I think a lot of people (my past self included) underestimate how much meticulous, behind-the-scenes work goes into something like PGDP

brador• 1 year ago

The amount of this that could be trivially automated fills me with rage.

Even just automated flagging of common errors would save 1000s of volunteer hours.

BlackFly• 1 year ago

It's unclear that that would save time. If you put in enough hours to the project, you can get classified as one of those later pass proofers. That is extremely taxing work because most of the scannos have already been found by the earlier proofers. You will "complete" multiple pages without ever finding a scanno. The doubt starts to set in if you are on auto-pilot or not.

Meanwhile, in that early stage, because of the stream of errors, it is easy to pay attention and feel like you are doing rewarding work. Moreover, if you are quite quick and diligent, you can basically just read a book as volunteer work.

Also, sometimes the error is in the source material. Different editors have different opinions about what should be done there. Sometimes I had to re-add mistakes that were "fixed" by early proofers trying to correct grammar, if I recall correctly... it was a while back that I volunteered.

executesorder66• 1 year ago

In the 20-teens

That being 2013 to 2019?

thangalin• 1 year ago

https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/04/11/project-gutenberg-p...

Of all these projects, the most amenable to automatic typesetting are those produced by Standard Ebooks and HTML Writers Guild. The benefit of using HTML Writers Guild is their semantic markup and simple document type definition (DTD) file. Standard Ebooks, as the name suggests, are brilliantly standardized and have an excellent Manual of Style that describes what to expect from the XHTML.

neves• 1 year ago

I really miss some kind of organization. I can't find a most downloaded page, or even some recommendations lists.

HexPhantom5• 1 year ago

Love that they're using Git and keeping everything open. It's rare to see such a thoughtful blend of literary love and modern tooling

macmac• 1 year ago

Does anyone know why the beautiful covers disappear when I import these books in standard format into Calibre?

zestyping2• 1 year ago

For a project that crows so loudly about its typographic prowess, the home page offers a comically terrible reading experience.

https://imgur.com/a/7uPhyTd

Huge, wildly irregular word gaps, awkward hyphenation, stacked hyphen breaks.

I suspect most of this could be improved simply by letting go of the slavish attachment to full justification and expanding the column to a more reasonable width by reducing the font size and margins.

Standard Ebooks: liberated ebooks, carefully produced for the true book lover

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