61–70 of 158 posts
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I’m curious, why do you have a policy against hosting religious books?
I'd imagine that if they host one religions books, many more religions will come out of the wood work and demand their books also be included, leading the site to be largely religious texts.
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 (This post is slightly out of date as there is a database now; but it's used for managing Patrons - and soon a cover art listing and approval system - not for serving the actual ebooks, which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’m curious, why do you have a policy against hosting religious books?
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 (This post is slightly out of date as there is a database now; but it's used for managing Patrons - and soon a cover art listing and approval system - not for serving the actual ebooks, which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…
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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 h…
On the other side of the coin, Standard Ebooks's heavy endorsement/buy-in of GitHub-based workflows are offputting to broader audiences. (It's pretty offputting to me, and I'm not even non-technical; I just recognize it as a sort of Conway's Law + Law of the Hammer sort of thing, and it chafes.) I.e., for others what you describe is far less than "ideal".
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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.
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…
Inevitably, like everyone who rejects PHP frameworks because "PHP is already a templating language", you just wound up reinventing the framework anyway. I'm not complaining - It's just, there's a reason everyone goes for the existing frameworks and it isn't addiction to complexity. Raw PHP code is legendarily insecure and prone to XSS and other issues if you don't do things exactly right. Nice site, though.
Not any more so than sites with frameworks. I’ve found XSS issues in Java Spring framework built sites that didn’t “do things exactly right”. A framework doesn’t magically fix that.
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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 h…
> 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[...] On the other side of the coin, Standard Ebooks's heavy endorsement/bu…
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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?
* NB: whether this is actually the case or not is a separate matter
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Like PG, our editions are blends of other editions, along with our own updates. Often our edition winds up looking nothing like the PG edition, for example when we combine volumes, extract footnotes into endnotes, remove pagination, and so on. So submitting back to PG would be more like replacing a PG edition, instead of updating it; and I doubt the original PG submitter would like it if their hard work was simply re…
Yeah, I was just looking through A Christmas Carol and observed a handful of editorial changes in the commits https://github.com/standardebooks/charles-dickens_a-christma... > (bran-new → brand-new, frouzy → frowzy, and “Lowercase some gratuitously uppercased words”). Frouzy → frowzy I’m mildly in favour of. Ditching bran-new definitely loses character (he omitted the d on purpose !). One or two of the lowercased wor…
Agree on notes in print, side notes (on very-wide editions) are best, then foot, then end of chapter endnotes. Full end-of-work endnotes are awful. Maybe they're better in ebooks, than footnotes, though? E-readers' poor UX for not-even-that-advanced features of books is part of why I barely use them, and practically never for any work that'd have notes of any sort.
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> 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[...] On the other side of the coin, Standard Ebooks's heavy endorsement/bu…
You don't have to use Github if you don't want to, but you do have to use Git. We've had more than a few producers successfuly produce ebooks without using GitHub or Google Groups.