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…
It's very uncommon, if you want to do that then just email me privately and we can set something up.
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.)
I could see how that would be helpful, but at least for my use case I'm more interested in seeing how LLMs integrated with computer vision can speed up transcriptions. Since a thorough proofread by a human is already baked into the SE production process (and is indeed one of the major selling points), having more automated tools to aid proofreading is nice but doesn't do anything fundamentally different, from my point of view. Whereas if LLMs can be leveraged for transcription SE producers no longer need to depend on external projects like Project Gutenberg or Wikisource to produce texts (which can take months) or transcribe texts from OCR results by hand (very tedious and error-prone--believe me, I'm speaking from experience!). It would drastically open up the range of possible books someone could reasonably produce (in a timely fashion) for SE.
Kobo, with either stock OS or KOReader (I use this, in part because the font size can be easily increased for my daughter who so far needs text larger than stock) or Plato.
Is the build quality and backlighting as good as the Kindle? And do they have a seamless option (no notched screen)?
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…
The page for collections could stand to lose the "Browse free ebooks in the" preamble. It makes it harder to distinguish when looking at a list of open tabs. Consider: - "Browse free ebooks in the Encyclopædia Britannica’s Gateway to the Great Books set[…]"[1] - "Browse free ebooks in the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels set[…]"[2] - "Browse free ebooks in the Modern Library’s 100 Best Nonfiction set[…]"[3] (Indeed,…
>The page for collections could stand to lose the "Browse free ebooks in the" preamble.
That looks like it might be search engine optimization.
The page for collections could stand to lose the "Browse free ebooks in the" preamble. It makes it harder to distinguish when looking at a list of open tabs. Consider: - "Browse free ebooks in the Encyclopædia Britannica’s Gateway to the Great Books set[…]"[1] - "Browse free ebooks in the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels set[…]"[2] - "Browse free ebooks in the Modern Library’s 100 Best Nonfiction set[…]"[3] (Indeed,…
>The page for collections could stand to lose the "Browse free ebooks in the" preamble. That looks like it might be search engine optimization.
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…
Eh, I disagree. $10 to be able to have it this second on my Kindle vs. waiting to get the physical copy feels like a good value.
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.
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…
Physical media tends to be ~30-40% of the costs, so I think it's more like $6 or $7.
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 publi…
That's great, thank you! We've had various people ask about us getting on Mastodon but frankly I really dislike social media and have only the vaguest understanding of how Mastodon works.
If we did, then someone would have to volunteer to run the account, and also the account must be able to delegate posting powers to another user without exposing the account's master password (like Tweetdeck or Facebook are able to do). If that's possible and you're interested in helping, please send me an email!