If by some chance a maintainer reads this thread a couple requests:
1) There are a lot of obscure books which is great. Also doesn’t hurt to add some of the GOATS such as the works of Plato or perhaps even the Harvard Classics
2) Sorting on site is frustrating
3) I would be willing to commission high quality epubs and I’m sure others would too for my own benefit and humanity. For example I can get copies of the works for Plato on Gutenberg but it merits a Standard Ebooks edition and I wouldn’t blink at donating $250 or some number toward that cause. Knowing kids across the globe would have access to high quality digital editions is worth it to me. Worth exploring setting up a program for this.
Project lead here. There's thousands of books we want to produce out there, and limited volunteer hours. If there's something you want to work on, it might be fun to get started as a producer for the project yourself. (Note that we ask that new producers start on a simpler project first, which might rule out some longer and more complicated stuff like Plato translations--at least to start with.)
I've been exploring the idea of crowdsourcing financing for ebook production. But I think we need some kind of not-for-profit framework set up first. If anyone is in that space and would like to talk about NFP infrastructure, or being a NFP fiscal sponsor, please contact me!
> There are a lot of obscure books which is great.
This is my biggest issue: discoverability.
The site has an index which shows 12 books at a time, and it looks like 36 pages. So roughly 430 books.
This is not actually a gigantic number of books, one that is small enough that it would be great to look through all the books, and yet I'm never going to do that if I have to page through 12 results at a time.
It would be great to get a simple list view of the collection.
Not to blow my own trumpet too much, but I just finished producing a complete Poe short fiction collection for SE if you’re looking for something to read, and submitted 1,025 corrections back to Gutenberg’s collection in the process: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/edgar-allan-poe/short-fict...
I was just thinking that it might be nice to form playlists of short stories from multiple books/authors. There's probably a bunch of lists (award winning, by genre, era etc). Seems a shame to enforce the bundling at a book level.
Project lead here. Glad to see that people like the project, and I'm happy to answer any questions.
We're always looking for producers to volunteer to work on new ebooks. The process is a blend of many different disciplines, so if you're interested in art, literature, programming, and the command line, trying your hand at an SE production might be fun!
First: thanks for this project. Currently halfway Gullivers Travels, and re-ead and re-discovered some great classics through your project.
What are the plans for other languages, if any?
I noticed that you have e.g. German or French originals translated to English. Is there place in the project for the original languages?
And what about translations to other languages? If I'm going to read a translation of Les trois mousquetaires, I'd prefer a translation to my native language instead of English.
Edit: saw the thread about this down below too late; was on mobile. Never mind my questions, they seem to be answered.
One of me pandemic projects was to take the books on Standardebooks.org, parse the ePub and write transformations into HTML with indexing. Was trying to build a platform for me to write tech books on, but I wound up just enjoying getting into the classics again. Will probably delete my book and just make it a site to read the classics online.
This is very nice! A nice addition would be a widget to allow changing between a few different font faces and color palettes (like you'd see in typical ebook readers or "reader mode" browser tools).
The tail -r is to reverse the output, it's otherwise in approximately reverse alphabetical order of author's first name. Output is
Hadji Murád - Leo Tolstoy
Pierre and Jean - Guy de Maupassant
The Red House Mystery - A. A. Milne
The Moon Pool - A. Merritt
Fables - Aesop
Poirot Investigates - Agatha Christie
The Man in the Brown Suit - Agatha Christie ...
I was thrilled when I read the part about not ignoring dashes. So I was a bit disappointed when I saw the "Rich & detailed metadata" screenshot had the dreaded double hyphen. Even acabal's replies on this thread use a double hyphen.
I guess I shouldn't complain too much, even the New York Times misuses the double hyphen.
Maybe you're referring to the LoC categories? Those are separated by two dashes as the industry standard for that metadata. The actual text of the books features correct em dashes.
Doesn't work for me with Firefox 82.0.3 (64 bit) on Win10. Hitting the Read Book link just gives me a blank window with the Close Book link at the top.
Took me a few moments to realize that this is because my Firefox is set to download PDFs instead of displaying them in Firefox.
Just one thing: the two-level horizontal scroll doesn't work consistently for me, and just seems a bit weird. I feel like the top level navigation should be left to the obvious top links. I don't really see the point of visualising all the sections as a continuous whole, whereas the individual lists make sense to be scrollable.
I've been working on a "fork" for Spanish books under a new imprint that I will launch when I finish my 10th book (I'm about 60% along).
One fact of reality is that Standard Ebooks' tooling is English-based. Everything from the pages/xhtml it generates to its typography tools to its style guide expects English. For example, Spanish uses — and «» instead of English's “” and ‘’ for dialogue so you can imagine how SE's punctuation tooling heuristics are going to differ here.
You'd also have to come up with a new set of standards for another language. What sort of correction is a fair modernization and which would be unfair editorialization? SE itself already makes controversial decisions here for English like "to-day" -> "today".
It would be a large undertaking to parameterize some sort of LANG=EN setting and imo not worth it. I think the only route for that sort of thing to happen is if 2+ "forks" get to Standard Ebooks' quality and then decide to work together years down the road.
Also, legal clarity is sometimes an issue in other countries where an English translation written in the USA of that same work is clearly in the public domain. There are works where the original non-English content, despite being long translated into English, are still owned by the estate, but the English translation is liberated.
Something I realized was just how many books exist only as scans. Transcription isn't very fun, but this makes it rewarding. For example, I have some early Spanish sci-fi books I've transcribed into epubs that you cannot find outside of dirty scans.
As others mentioned, different languages have different typography rules. Our toolset is English-based and making it generic for any language would be extremely difficult and time consuming. Additionally, all of us read in (at least) English, and at least I can't credibly say I'm a grammar/typography expert in any other language.
In the past people have expressed interest in forking the toolset for other languages, which is totally fine. But I don't think I've seen any of those attempts come to fruition yet.
This is fantastic, I had no idea of this site and thanks for that. Some weeks ago I had the idea to create a similar site to compete with Delphi , but you can't compete against free(in both senses), especially when the quality is very high. Kudos.
I just released what I think is a well crafted e-book for a favorite old science fiction book, with permission from the author: https://twirb.github.io
Huh, that is weird that the dupe detector didn't pick that up. I was going through some old bookmarks and submitted dark.fail and it hit the dupe detector as a duplicate submission from October 2019 from user rakefire.
A few other links to different sites I tried submitting also hit the dupe detector too. Normally I do a hn.algolia.com search on the headline keywords (sorted by date) for anything current before submitting a link but after the third or fourth 'dupe' I dug out the Standard Ebooks link, gritted my teeth and mentally dared the dupe detector to find someone else on HN that had come across the site before. Turns out many had (lol).
Your comment made me chuckle (and also scratch my head a little about the dupe-detector algorithm) so thanks for pointing it out (and have a +1 from me as thanks).
What e-reader software for desktop computers do you recommend that doesn't look bad?
It seems like a waste to read a carefully crafted ebook using Calibre, which is pretty bad from a graphical/aesthetic perspective. Foliate is better, but not great either.
I'm thinking of running a Windows VM just to run Adobe Digital Editions and read epubs comfortably. Is there a better option?
I absolutely love this service and have downloaded the books and uploaded and synced them on my Google Books iOS app. Some books I'd like to recommend: Meditations, Dialogues,
The Enchiridion, Discourses, and Siddhartha.
I would love if the browse page could sort by "popular" or "recommended". With such a carefully curated collection it seems a shame to not surface the best ebooks more easily.
[+] [-] lefstathiou|5 years ago|reply
If by some chance a maintainer reads this thread a couple requests:
1) There are a lot of obscure books which is great. Also doesn’t hurt to add some of the GOATS such as the works of Plato or perhaps even the Harvard Classics
2) Sorting on site is frustrating
3) I would be willing to commission high quality epubs and I’m sure others would too for my own benefit and humanity. For example I can get copies of the works for Plato on Gutenberg but it merits a Standard Ebooks edition and I wouldn’t blink at donating $250 or some number toward that cause. Knowing kids across the globe would have access to high quality digital editions is worth it to me. Worth exploring setting up a program for this.
[+] [-] acabal|5 years ago|reply
Our wanted ebook list includes a list of works that we think are good starts for first-time producers: https://standardebooks.org/contribute/wanted-ebooks
I've been exploring the idea of crowdsourcing financing for ebook production. But I think we need some kind of not-for-profit framework set up first. If anyone is in that space and would like to talk about NFP infrastructure, or being a NFP fiscal sponsor, please contact me!
[+] [-] SamBam|5 years ago|reply
This is my biggest issue: discoverability.
The site has an index which shows 12 books at a time, and it looks like 36 pages. So roughly 430 books.
This is not actually a gigantic number of books, one that is small enough that it would be great to look through all the books, and yet I'm never going to do that if I have to page through 12 results at a time.
It would be great to get a simple list view of the collection.
[+] [-] curmudgeon22|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neves|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zeorin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robin_reala|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0-_-0|5 years ago|reply
[1]: https://standardebooks.org/rss/new-releases
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbboehr|5 years ago|reply
Sorry for bringing it up, but is that a typo in the description?
[+] [-] acabal|5 years ago|reply
We're always looking for producers to volunteer to work on new ebooks. The process is a blend of many different disciplines, so if you're interested in art, literature, programming, and the command line, trying your hand at an SE production might be fun!
[+] [-] berkes|5 years ago|reply
What are the plans for other languages, if any?
I noticed that you have e.g. German or French originals translated to English. Is there place in the project for the original languages?
And what about translations to other languages? If I'm going to read a translation of Les trois mousquetaires, I'd prefer a translation to my native language instead of English.
Edit: saw the thread about this down below too late; was on mobile. Never mind my questions, they seem to be answered.
[+] [-] sudhirj|5 years ago|reply
https://papiary.com/
[+] [-] BHSPitMonkey|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eslaught|5 years ago|reply
https://standardebooks.org/manual/1.1.1
[+] [-] yesenadam|5 years ago|reply
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks?query=e
displays every book with an e in the title or author's name on one page. I guess that doesn't leave out many.
[+] [-] yesenadam|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clankyclanker|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AdmiralAsshat|5 years ago|reply
https://standardebooks.org/contribute/report-errors-upstream
[+] [-] 0-_-0|5 years ago|reply
https://standardebooks.org/rss/new-releases
[+] [-] dn3500|5 years ago|reply
I guess I shouldn't complain too much, even the New York Times misuses the double hyphen.
[+] [-] acabal|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] resdev|5 years ago|reply
Features:
- works in all platforms with pdf format
- faster navigation
- faster search
[+] [-] kwhitefoot|5 years ago|reply
Took me a few moments to realize that this is because my Firefox is set to download PDFs instead of displaying them in Firefox.
[+] [-] jgtrosh|5 years ago|reply
Just one thing: the two-level horizontal scroll doesn't work consistently for me, and just seems a bit weird. I feel like the top level navigation should be left to the obvious top links. I don't really see the point of visualising all the sections as a continuous whole, whereas the individual lists make sense to be scrollable.
[+] [-] ronjouch|5 years ago|reply
If maintainers are seeing this: any plans to publish non-English books? Is there room to collaborate on adding support for it?
[+] [-] hombre_fatal|5 years ago|reply
One fact of reality is that Standard Ebooks' tooling is English-based. Everything from the pages/xhtml it generates to its typography tools to its style guide expects English. For example, Spanish uses — and «» instead of English's “” and ‘’ for dialogue so you can imagine how SE's punctuation tooling heuristics are going to differ here.
You'd also have to come up with a new set of standards for another language. What sort of correction is a fair modernization and which would be unfair editorialization? SE itself already makes controversial decisions here for English like "to-day" -> "today".
It would be a large undertaking to parameterize some sort of LANG=EN setting and imo not worth it. I think the only route for that sort of thing to happen is if 2+ "forks" get to Standard Ebooks' quality and then decide to work together years down the road.
Also, legal clarity is sometimes an issue in other countries where an English translation written in the USA of that same work is clearly in the public domain. There are works where the original non-English content, despite being long translated into English, are still owned by the estate, but the English translation is liberated.
Something I realized was just how many books exist only as scans. Transcription isn't very fun, but this makes it rewarding. For example, I have some early Spanish sci-fi books I've transcribed into epubs that you cannot find outside of dirty scans.
[+] [-] AdmiralAsshat|5 years ago|reply
https://standardebooks.org/contribute/accepted-ebooks
> Types of ebooks we don’t accept
> Non-English-language books. Translations to English are, of course, OK.
[+] [-] acabal|5 years ago|reply
In the past people have expressed interest in forking the toolset for other languages, which is totally fine. But I don't think I've seen any of those attempts come to fruition yet.
[+] [-] resdev|5 years ago|reply
(which are sourced from Gutenberg catalog, but with dynamic navigation and search)
[+] [-] cambalache|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ben_pfaff|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samwyse|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|5 years ago|reply
Yup: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=standardebooks.org
[+] [-] Pick-A-Hill2019|5 years ago|reply
Huh, that is weird that the dupe detector didn't pick that up. I was going through some old bookmarks and submitted dark.fail and it hit the dupe detector as a duplicate submission from October 2019 from user rakefire.
A few other links to different sites I tried submitting also hit the dupe detector too. Normally I do a hn.algolia.com search on the headline keywords (sorted by date) for anything current before submitting a link but after the third or fourth 'dupe' I dug out the Standard Ebooks link, gritted my teeth and mentally dared the dupe detector to find someone else on HN that had come across the site before. Turns out many had (lol).
Your comment made me chuckle (and also scratch my head a little about the dupe-detector algorithm) so thanks for pointing it out (and have a +1 from me as thanks).
[+] [-] dang|5 years ago|reply
2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20594802
2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14570035
[+] [-] young_unixer|5 years ago|reply
It seems like a waste to read a carefully crafted ebook using Calibre, which is pretty bad from a graphical/aesthetic perspective. Foliate is better, but not great either.
I'm thinking of running a Windows VM just to run Adobe Digital Editions and read epubs comfortably. Is there a better option?
[+] [-] AdmiralAsshat|5 years ago|reply
Bookworm, perhaps?
https://www.flathub.org/apps/details/com.github.babluboy.boo...
[+] [-] acabal|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bigbubba|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glotgizmo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] odyssey7|5 years ago|reply
This is very cool and I hope it stays around.
[+] [-] raxxorrax|5 years ago|reply
edit: Aside from the books, the site is quite nice too.
[+] [-] gordon_freeman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] idolaspecus|5 years ago|reply
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/hermann-hesse/siddhartha/g...
Edit: I thought you meant "recommend to add" vs. "these are available and I recommend them", my mistake.
[+] [-] Splendor|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] levlaz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robin_reala|5 years ago|reply