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Standard Ebooks

standardebooks.org

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Re: Standard Ebooks

#11

Post by chrismorgan »

NKosmatos wrote: post #8

For other curious HNers, what differentiates [0] them from Project Gutenberg [1] is the improved typography/styling and the full usage of modern reader techniques. Think of it like, etext != ebook. [0] https://standardebooks.org/about/what-makes-standard-ebooks-... [1] https://www.gutenberg.org

So why don’t they contribute these things back to Project Gutenberg? Particularly the typography ones like curly quotes and proper dashes, as those are almost always corrections where the overly-ASCII Gutenberg source doesn’t match the original.

Re: Standard Ebooks

#12

Post by Lukas_S »

acabal wrote: post #9

Editor-in-Chief here, happy to answer any questions! Of interest might be my blog post on how SE runs on a small VPS using classic web tech: https://alexcabal.com/posts/standard-ebooks-and-classic-web-... (This post is slightly out of date as there is a database now; but it's used for managing Patrons - and soon a cover art listing and approval system - not for serving the actual ebooks, which are still served as des…

This is such a cool project. Every time it hits the front page I browse the selections like I’m at a book store.

Have you considered making books sortable by popularity? It might be more approachable for new users if they see books they recognize at the top.

Re: Standard Ebooks

#13

Post by harwoodjp »

acabal wrote: post #9

Editor-in-Chief here, happy to answer any questions! Of interest might be my blog post on how SE runs on a small VPS using classic web tech: https://alexcabal.com/posts/standard-ebooks-and-classic-web-... (This post is slightly out of date as there is a database now; but it's used for managing Patrons - and soon a cover art listing and approval system - not for serving the actual ebooks, which are still served as des…

You could probably drop the server and use Cloudflare Pages and a SSG. I use Astro for https://sabine.press/

Edit: oh and Lambda for a total of 2 server functions

Re: Standard Ebooks

#15

Post by NelsonMinar »

acabal wrote: post #9

Editor-in-Chief here, happy to answer any questions! Of interest might be my blog post on how SE runs on a small VPS using classic web tech: https://alexcabal.com/posts/standard-ebooks-and-classic-web-... (This post is slightly out of date as there is a database now; but it's used for managing Patrons - and soon a cover art listing and approval system - not for serving the actual ebooks, which are still served as des…

Thank you for Standard Books!

I remember when Manybooks used to be what you want. But quality dropped precipitously with self-published new novels, I suspect some money is changing hands somewhere.

What happened to Manybooks? Does Standard Books have a plan for avoiding that?

Re: Standard Ebooks

#16

Post by acabal »

Handprint4469 wrote: post #2

I would love if they offered a download option for a file you could just upload to Lulu (or similar service) to have it printed and mailed to you. Every time I buy one of these public domain books from Amazon, they are invariably shitty, low-quality "printed by Amazon" versions. I miss the time where you could get a high-quality hardcover, but more and more those seem reserved only for the current week's NYT best-sel…

I've considered running a campaign to finance a print run of some of our (SE's) books. But the fact is that it's just so easy to find super cheap paper copies of these books almost anywhere. As long as you buy a copy that was printed before, say, 2005 - or from a reputable publisher like Oxford or Penguin - then the edition will already be pro quality. (After that, it's much more likely that you're buying a print-on-demand copy of a raw Project Gutenberg text.)

If we did offer print books, I think the value-add would be making them extremely ornate, one-of-a-kind editions like Arion Press or Folio Society make, and we'd charge a lot for a copy. But even then I'm still not sure the juice would be worth the squeeze, because that's also been done to death... how many more fancy editions of Dracula or whatever does the world need?

Re: Standard Ebooks

#17

Post by mouse_ »

chrismorgan wrote: post #11
NKosmatos wrote: post #8

For other curious HNers, what differentiates [0] them from Project Gutenberg [1] is the improved typography/styling and the full usage of modern reader techniques. Think of it like, etext != ebook. [0] https://standardebooks.org/about/what-makes-standard-ebooks-... [1] https://www.gutenberg.org

So why don’t they contribute these things back to Project Gutenberg? Particularly the typography ones like curly quotes and proper dashes, as those are almost always corrections where the overly-ASCII Gutenberg source doesn’t match the original.

Also wondering this.

Re: Standard Ebooks

#18

Post by acabal »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #15
acabal wrote: post #9

Editor-in-Chief here, happy to answer any questions! Of interest might be my blog post on how SE runs on a small VPS using classic web tech: https://alexcabal.com/posts/standard-ebooks-and-classic-web-... (This post is slightly out of date as there is a database now; but it's used for managing Patrons - and soon a cover art listing and approval system - not for serving the actual ebooks, which are still served as des…

Thank you for Standard Books! I remember when Manybooks used to be what you want. But quality dropped precipitously with self-published new novels, I suspect some money is changing hands somewhere. What happened to Manybooks? Does Standard Books have a plan for avoiding that?

I don't know anything about Manybooks' history, sorry.

At SE we focus exclusively on US public domain titles; that's one of the major philosophical points of the project. The other major point is a high quality standard, so it's in our best interest to keep pursuing that. SE became known due to its quality standard, not because it's more free ebooks. Therefore if we strayed from those points then we'd be just another free ebook site, of which there are no shortage.

Quality is also why we reject self-published books that have been dedicated to the public domain, as those are typically low-quality content to begin with. (Though I wouldn't call every single book we host "high quality content" in the sense that each one is up there with Shakespeare. But books that have survived a hundred years tend to have survived because they're not slush.)

Re: Standard Ebooks

#19

Post by acabal »

Lukas_S wrote: post #12
acabal wrote: post #9

Editor-in-Chief here, happy to answer any questions! Of interest might be my blog post on how SE runs on a small VPS using classic web tech: https://alexcabal.com/posts/standard-ebooks-and-classic-web-... (This post is slightly out of date as there is a database now; but it's used for managing Patrons - and soon a cover art listing and approval system - not for serving the actual ebooks, which are still served as des…

This is such a cool project. Every time it hits the front page I browse the selections like I’m at a book store. Have you considered making books sortable by popularity? It might be more approachable for new users if they see books they recognize at the top.

That's a frequent request but it would also require having our catalog in a database, which we don't have right now. I do think the time is soon for doing that for several reasons, but there's no spare time in my day at the moment.

Re: Standard Ebooks

#20

Post by ebooks-ta »

acabal wrote: post #9

Editor-in-Chief here, happy to answer any questions! Of interest might be my blog post on how SE runs on a small VPS using classic web tech: https://alexcabal.com/posts/standard-ebooks-and-classic-web-... (This post is slightly out of date as there is a database now; but it's used for managing Patrons - and soon a cover art listing and approval system - not for serving the actual ebooks, which are still served as des…

Do you have any thoughts on providing manually pre-formatted PDF files? Em-dashes, curly quotes, etc. are all nice, it's a step in the right direction, but in the end the EPUB file needs to be interpreted by the ebook reader on the fly and in terms of typesetting quality the outcome is far from what physical books provide, since you still get orphans, weird hyphenations, ugly/misaligned chapter titles. For me, nothing beats reading a print-ready PDF file.
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