I’ve only read a handful of books from Standard Ebook, but they’ve all been amazing quality ebooks — better than some ebooks I’ve paid for through an Amazon Kindle back in the day.
These folks keep an RSS (love it) with each new book they add to the collection. The hoarder/collector in me likes to have all these perfectly formatted books and thanks to the hardworking people at SE I have, and you can too, some 700 classics for free!
My wife is an admin on the PG project. She puts in a lot of effort to keep the site secure. I think they welcome efforts like yours, and reuse is part of why they exist! They also research the copyrights, to make sure they are clear to share.
I use Project Gutenberg a lot personally, and in fact I'm using one of their books as a study for my upcoming startup:
One thing I really like about the PG site is that a few years ago they removed most of the JavaScript, which IMO makes it more usable. I haven't looked at Standard Ebooks yet, but I look forward to. Thanks!
One book I'd like to see on Standard Ebooks is "The Flying Girl", which my wife and I just read and loved. It's by L. Frank Baum (The Wizard of Oz), and is about a flying startup in 1911, which I previously posted on HN:
Love this project! I’ve read several books from Project Gutenberg and owe a great deal to the project. I love seeing this extension of it and will be sure to avail myself of it and possibly contribute one day!
Not a question, so much as a suggestion from an interested netizen: it would be great to see changes flowed back up to Gutenberg. I know they have a process for submitting updates - I’ve made several to The Wealth of Nations myself.
Thanks for sharing the project, and I look forward to my next read!
In general, I love the format, however I notice that (for example), Hugh Lofting's "The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle" has none of Lofting's illustrations - which seems a shame in a children's book - is this a deliberate policy choice?
Do you have any plans to support (and accept contributions to) non-English books? It’ll be amazing to see original Russian classic texts redone with the same level of care.
What a great project! Would you have a need for a veteran web dev who also happened to be an English major? Took a look at the volunteer page, but nothing jumped out.
* Have you considered putting the books onto the official store? It would make it much smoother to get books on the device. You could charge a small fee to pay for the effort, I’d pay the extra to support the project and avoid the hassle of doing an upload. I just saw above you now do bulk downloads, which will help also.
* Although your covers are beautiful, they only appear in a small corner of the screen for the Kobo devices I’ve used, even using the Kepub format, is that a known issue?
And also to thank you for the effort. This project plays a really important role and has been a source of pleasure for many of my friends and family.
I'm getting old and my eye sight is going. Are there any read-a-loud options you can recommend? The Edge browser does a decent job on PDF's in a voice you can select, but it's kind of hacky for an entire book.
Thoughts on introducing some kind of popularity/rank sort? I.e., number of on-site downloads, off-site citations or some book-equivalent-IMDB. Is it a conscious choice not to have one or just feature prioritization?
The site looks lovely and I think it's great to have classic books properly formatted for e-readers, I've snatched up the ones that were sitting on my reading list for a while, but I find it unfortunate that it's a bit rough to find new things. I guess that mimics the feeling of a library, where books are grouped by broad genre but only alphabetical (or random) within, but I feel like it would be useful if it had some kind of pointers for discovery.
Have any of the ebooks included any serious math? I see that MathML is the expectation, but I wonder if the rules around the math aren't just ignored because of the rest of the culture around which books are selected and worked on.
Indeed, in academic writing I never see MathML used in an HMTL setting, it's always MathJax or KaTeX. For your purposes this is probably fine, but imagining if someone wanted to author a high quality math textbook following the same standard I would wager they'd run into a brick wall
I saw you mentioned using a Kobo eink device. Is that what you would recommend? It seems the 11th gen Kindle Paperwhite and Kobo Libra 2 are pretty comparable. I'd like to support a non-Amazon product, but it also looks like I can get 20% off a new Kindle by trading in my very old Kindle Touch, making the Kobo effectively $50-60 more expensive...
Would you consider creating a Goodreads collection/list of all the books in Standard Ebooks? Though I can appreciate if it's too much work to curate or manage.
Might be a stupid question but in France books over 50 years of age ended up "free" (to read not to exploit), does it work the same way on all countries? Does it mean we can access books that are over 50 years in your platform or even GP?
Would you accept novel translations of non-English classics? The policy suggests yes, but I imagine such a work would fall under US copyright (which the policy forbids).
If you wanted to create an ebook from scratch, how would you do this? Would you write plain html. Would you write markdown, and convert it? What tools would you use?
Have you considered adding A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates to the collection? It's quite the thriller -- every page is a surprise and you will never guess what happens next!
Curious: Since Standard Ebooks uses Project Gutenberg's work, why not contribute back instead of 'fork' to a separate project? Are there obstacles preventing this or making it less than desirable?
Publish date should be standard information available on every layer of the UI where the book title is shown. Otherwise this is excellent and very much appreciated.
Completely off topic, but the name “standard” makes me think of a hilarious Bob Mortimer story on “World I Lie To You?” where he accidentally set his house on fire as a child with a box of “Standard Fireworks”, which he assumed would be very basic and safe because of the name.
Huh. Choosing a book at somewhat random - Mike by P.G. Wodehouse - neither the compatible or advanced (experimental?) epubs are working terribly well in Bluefire Reader on my iPad. I might poke at this with Calibre. Or if there are recommendations for another epub reader, with the caveat that I need annotations.
It looks like the workflow is per book. That ... seems odd.
This is really great, and a fantastic complement to PG.
I'm a bit surprised that pdf downloads are not proposed. Given the (lovely!) emphasis on typography, it would seem the natural option. The epub formats are a bit foreign to me. The html version is alright, and you can "print" it with the web browser, but it does not produce a perfect pdf.
[+] [-] jibbers|3 years ago|reply
These folks keep an RSS (love it) with each new book they add to the collection. The hoarder/collector in me likes to have all these perfectly formatted books and thanks to the hardworking people at SE I have, and you can too, some 700 classics for free!
[+] [-] acabal|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stew-j|3 years ago|reply
I use Project Gutenberg a lot personally, and in fact I'm using one of their books as a study for my upcoming startup:
https://github.com/carter-brothers/hand-propped#first-stage-...
One thing I really like about the PG site is that a few years ago they removed most of the JavaScript, which IMO makes it more usable. I haven't looked at Standard Ebooks yet, but I look forward to. Thanks!
One book I'd like to see on Standard Ebooks is "The Flying Girl", which my wife and I just read and loved. It's by L. Frank Baum (The Wizard of Oz), and is about a flying startup in 1911, which I previously posted on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32142757
[+] [-] lumb63|3 years ago|reply
Not a question, so much as a suggestion from an interested netizen: it would be great to see changes flowed back up to Gutenberg. I know they have a process for submitting updates - I’ve made several to The Wealth of Nations myself.
Thanks for sharing the project, and I look forward to my next read!
[+] [-] vmilner|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] firstbabylonian|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ioblomov|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Brakenshire|3 years ago|reply
* Have you considered putting the books onto the official store? It would make it much smoother to get books on the device. You could charge a small fee to pay for the effort, I’d pay the extra to support the project and avoid the hassle of doing an upload. I just saw above you now do bulk downloads, which will help also.
* Although your covers are beautiful, they only appear in a small corner of the screen for the Kobo devices I’ve used, even using the Kepub format, is that a known issue?
And also to thank you for the effort. This project plays a really important role and has been a source of pleasure for many of my friends and family.
[+] [-] labrador|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] axiomdata316|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duckmysick|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stevage|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nynx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BbzzbB|3 years ago|reply
The site looks lovely and I think it's great to have classic books properly formatted for e-readers, I've snatched up the ones that were sitting on my reading list for a while, but I find it unfortunate that it's a bit rough to find new things. I guess that mimics the feeling of a library, where books are grouped by broad genre but only alphabetical (or random) within, but I feel like it would be useful if it had some kind of pointers for discovery.
[+] [-] POPOSYS|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] voxl|3 years ago|reply
Indeed, in academic writing I never see MathML used in an HMTL setting, it's always MathJax or KaTeX. For your purposes this is probably fine, but imagining if someone wanted to author a high quality math textbook following the same standard I would wager they'd run into a brick wall
[+] [-] aschismatic|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] compscistd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] politelemon|3 years ago|reply
Edit — oh, is this the list? https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/140305.Standard_Ebooks
[+] [-] neves|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NelsonMinar|3 years ago|reply
Love your project, thank you!
[+] [-] anatoly|3 years ago|reply
2. When you proofread and fix typos, do you contribute the fixes back upstream?
[+] [-] Namari|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fimdomeio|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Beldin|3 years ago|reply
Would you accept novel translations of non-English classics? The policy suggests yes, but I imagine such a work would fall under US copyright (which the policy forbids).
[+] [-] nilsandrey|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] closeneough|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] badtension|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rg111|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] infogulch|3 years ago|reply
Have you considered adding A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates to the collection? It's quite the thriller -- every page is a surprise and you will never guess what happens next!
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] virtualritz|3 years ago|reply
The flabbergasting quality (or absence thereof) of ebooks I purchase on Amazon is regularly driving me nuts.
Particularly forced justified layout (lacking hypenation, no less) – on a mobile phone. Wtf? Don't get me even started about the ‘typography’.
Great to see there are other people who care about these things.
[+] [-] NoboruWataya|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aclindsa|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] B1FF_PSUVM|3 years ago|reply
Uneven, but some contributors generate very good quality ebooks, and there's some unique stuff in collections and omnibus editions.
[+] [-] longnguyen|3 years ago|reply
Shameless plug: I build this little tool[0] to make it a little easier to send SE ebooks to your Kindle. Give it a try if you're a Kindle owner.
[0]: https://ktool.io
[+] [-] llaolleh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattwilsonn888|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aorth|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mike_n|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] willhinsa|3 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/Rqmd39GdDww
[+] [-] dontcare007|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] billybuckwheat|3 years ago|reply
I really should donate a few dollars to the project to show my appreciation and to try to help (in a small way) keep it going.
[+] [-] akprasad|3 years ago|reply
How closely do you work with Distributed Proofreaders? [1]
[1]: https://www.pgdp.net/c/
[+] [-] david38|3 years ago|reply
Literally thought it was about standard ebook structure (TOC, index, etc). Turned out to be Ebooks Brought Up a Notch!
[+] [-] squidbeak|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pronoiac|3 years ago|reply
It looks like the workflow is per book. That ... seems odd.
[+] [-] enriquto|3 years ago|reply
I'm a bit surprised that pdf downloads are not proposed. Given the (lovely!) emphasis on typography, it would seem the natural option. The epub formats are a bit foreign to me. The html version is alright, and you can "print" it with the web browser, but it does not produce a perfect pdf.
[+] [-] qqquackk|3 years ago|reply
Also what is this "advanced epub" format they have? I can't see where they describe the actual difference with "compatible epub".