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Standard Ebooks

standardebooks.org

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Re: Standard Ebooks

#31

Post by veridies »

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 (This post is slightly out of date as there is a database now; but it's used for managing Patrons - and soon a cover art listing and approval system - not for serving the actual ebooks, which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…

I've been eagerly awaiting the new Lord Peter Wimsey novel! To avoid burnout, I've been reading them as they enter the public domain instead of reading the whole series all at once, and I was hoping that it would be in the first batch this year. Thank you so much for your hard work!

Re: Standard Ebooks

#32

Post by 100k »

I’m happy to see Standard Ebooks here! I’ve read their editions of Nostromo by Joseph Conrad and Vanity Fair by William Thackeray and the quality great. I recommend it if you’re interested in classic literature.

Re: Standard Ebooks

#34

Post by pseingatl »

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 (This post is slightly out of date as there is a database now; but it's used for managing Patrons - and soon a cover art listing and approval system - not for serving the actual ebooks, which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…

What are the dimensions produced by se build-images?

Re: Standard Ebooks

#35

Post by dang »

Related:

Standard Ebooks - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32215324 - July 2022 (256 comments)

Free and liberated e-books, carefully produced for the true book lover - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25138534 - Nov 2020 (106 comments)

Standard Ebooks: Free public-domain ebooks, carefully produced - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20594802 - Aug 2019 (129 comments)

Standard Ebooks: Free and liberated ebooks, carefully produced - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14570035 - June 2017 (96 comments)

Re: Standard Ebooks

#36

Post by acabal »

flxfxp wrote: post #25

Very cool project. Does anyone know of something similar for audiobooks?

Librivox creates audiobooks of PD texts. I've heard good things about their work but I personally don't listen to any audiobooks in general.

Re: Standard Ebooks

#37

Post by paulcole »

dimmke wrote: post #6
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…

This could be a cool monetization strategy. I don't really read physical books, but the "classics" on Amazon are often complete ripoffs. Here's Crime and Punishment for $10 just to get the Kindle version: https://www.amazon.com/Punishment-Penguin-Classics-Fyodor-Do... I feel like these open domain novels published by big publishing houses have the veneer of legitimacy, but projects like the one this thread is about I…

Why is that book a ripoff?

Re: Standard Ebooks

#39

Post by weijiacheng »

harwoodjp wrote: post #14

I wonder if a scan -> OCR -> LLM proofreading pipeline is possible?

I am one of the SE editors/regular contributors and I did play around with this a bit for a poetry collection: https://groups.google.com/g/standardebooks/c/IUvGLmvZrmM/m/s...

I'm sure someone sufficiently determined and good at prompt engineering, and integrating LLMs into a larger toolset, could come up with something even better. I'm personally very skeptical of LLMs as a technology, but even I have to admit that this was a pretty ideal and unobjectionable use of LLMs.

That being said, though it was a fun experiment, I later found that it was easier (and less wasteful of natural resources) to just do the same thing with a bit of custom markup and a search and replace script.

Re: Standard Ebooks

#40

Post by weijiacheng »

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.

In addition to what Alex has said, as an SE contributor I do try to submit errata to Project Gutenberg where I can find the time and energy. Part of the problem, though, is that PG's errata process (https://www.gutenberg.org/help/errata.html) is quite cumbersome since you have to write an email to their errata team with each individual error. That's a real hassle to try to keep track of and submit. Ideally, if PG had something like a pull request system, I would just be able to find those errors in their code and submit the changes directly, but unfortunately they don't have that, so far as I am aware.

That is one major advantage SE has, I think, which is that we do allow people to make pull requests against any of our ebook repositories and any PRs that get merged are automatically deployed to the site. This makes it much, much easier for tech-savvy people to submit proofreading corrections!

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