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Standard Ebooks

standardebooks.org

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Re: Standard Ebooks

#71

Post by krapp »

cowsandmilk wrote: post #66
krapp wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> prone to XSS and other issues if you don't do things exactly right. 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.

No one mentioned magic. Frameworks are designed to do what PHP developers wind up implementing in an ad-hoc, haphazard way themselves, and tend to be better at doing it on average. Any code can have security issues but I'd trust a battle-hardened open source PHP framework over some random coder's hubris any day of the week.

Re: Standard Ebooks

#74

Post by pauloxnet »

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 (This post is slightly out of date as there is a database now; but it's used for managing Patrons - and soon a cover art listing and approval system - not for serving the actual ebooks, which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

Hi Alex, I shared the SE link here to help with donations and I hope it's working.

Thank you for your beautiful project.

For a few years, every January 1st, for public domain day, I have been promoting SE on social media, the thread on Mastodon is the one with the most involvement. https://fosstodon.org/@paulox/111680544393923401

It would be nice to have an SE account on Mastodon that posts about every new book published, since IMHO it's the social network more aligned with the spirit of SE.

Re: Standard Ebooks

#75

Post by pauloxnet »

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…

In addition to the Newsletter and Feeds, it would be nice to have a Blog or News section where you can publish news every now and then, for example an article for the public domain day would have been very useful for making new publications known, simplifying sharing and attracting new volunteers or donors.

Re: Standard Ebooks

#76

Post by duskwuff »

weijiacheng wrote: post #39
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 t…

I don't think that's quite what the parent had in mind.

The most natural application of a language model in proofreading is to compute perplexity across the text; if all goes well, errors should be detectable as points of unusually high perplexity. (In principle, this should even be able to spot otherwise undetectable errors like missing words.)

Re: Standard Ebooks

#77

Post by bentley »

wharvle wrote: post #69
chrismorgan wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, any edition of a book that's "updating" modern English loses me, including messing with capitalization. Not interested. I love the formatting on Standard Ebooks, but they're no use to me if they're "updating" language, aside from things like repairing typesetting and formatting lost or mangled in PG editions. Agree on notes in print, side notes (on very-wide editions) are best, then foot, then end of chapter en…

As someone who regularly compares different scans of old books, I counter: for centuries it’s already been common practice for publishers to update spellings, recapitalize, and even make more drastic changes. You just never noticed because print books don’t have a public commit log.

In the case of Standard Ebooks, “sound‐alike” changes are allowed (so spelling and capitalization changes are allowed when they make sense). Censorship, and even innocuous grammatical changes, are not. Despite generally appreciating old works in their own context, I find the tradeoff in readability for such a widespread practice to be worth it given how minor SE’s alterations are.

Re: Standard Ebooks

#78

Post by dimmke »

cxr wrote: post #68
paulcole wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that book a ripoff?

Without discounting the point made by smogcutter about Penguin's edition not actually being public domain: for a classic work, I'd expect to be able to get a paperback for less than $10.* And that involves a real-life physical artifact which (a) necessarily has lower margins than an ebook, and (b) doesn't come with the omnipresent threat that it will evaporate from your device (or your managed online locker or whatev…

Yes basically. I understand if a publisher commissioned a translation and put in work but $10 for a DRM digital copy is too steep. Maybe $3-$4 would be reasonable? Crime and Punishment was written in the 1800s, the author is long dead. And it's considered a historic and important piece of literature.

Regardless, it's great that these works are available in high quality for free.

Re: Standard Ebooks

#79

Post by bentley »

cxr wrote: post #64
weijiacheng wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Typos can be reported by email on SE too. Git is only required when you’re publishing a new book. My observation from watching the mailing list is that emailed typos are fixed quickly. (I always fix typos using pull requests, and those are acted on quickly too.)

Re: Standard Ebooks

#80

Post by starkparker »

acabal wrote: post #67
cxr wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> We've had more than a few producers successfuly produce ebooks without using GitHub or Google Groups.

Can you share or document how? https://standardebooks.org/contribute suggests that "Technically inclined readers can produce ebooks themselves" but doesn't provide any point of entry to do so other than a link to the GitHub org, and "No technical experience is necessary. Contact the mailing list if you want to help." just links to the Google Group.

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