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Standard Ebooks

standardebooks.org

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101–110 of 158 posts

Re: Standard Ebooks

#101

Post by chrismorgan »

bentley wrote: post #77
wharvle wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sen…

Sometimes capitalisation matters are close to purely stylistic, but other times they really are part of the content, guiding pronunciation or emphasis, so that lowercasing them harms the work. What is your opinion of my assessment in the above comment of some of the specific changes in https://github.com/standardebooks/charles-dickens_a-christma...>?

Re: Standard Ebooks

#102

Post by boznz »

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 (This post is slightly out of date as there is a database now; but it's used for managing Patrons - and soon a cover art listing and approval system - not for serving the actual ebooks, which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

Good to know that as a self-published author myself that the quality of any site is going to drop as soon as I put my book on there.

Every other book I read now is by an author with NO rating, I have read six this year, none were memorable, or my cup of tea I will give you that, but two of the four- or five-star offerings on Amazon were just as bad. As they say, if you don't open an oyster, you will never find a pearl.

Re: Standard Ebooks

#103

Post by boznz »

contrarian1234 wrote: post #100

There are HTML versions but they don't seem to reflow example: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/rudolph-erich-raspe/the-su... A bit offtopic, but I never understood why .epub is a thing. For instance the linked HTML/XHTML version seems to work just fine (except for the reflow thing.. but I assume that a CSS issue) .epub seems to be mostly HTML with a few pieces missing. I guess I don't understand why we needed a new…

epub is just a collection of zipped HTML, CSS FONTS and images and as bog standard as you can get. You can open it with a Zip extractor and see.

Re: Standard Ebooks

#104

Post by acabal »

boznz wrote: post #99
acabal wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kindle does not natively support epubs: https://standardebooks.org/help/how-to-use-our-ebooks#kindle...

I email epubs to my kindle frequently and they open and read just like any ebook. I last tried this a week ago and it was fine.

When you use 'Send to Kindle' to send an epub to your device, you are not reading an epub. In the link above, it mentions how Kindle converts epub to an Amazon format before allowing your device to read it. Amazon's formats on the whole are inferior, with poor rendering capabilities, and an automatic conversion means all bets are off in terms of what the ebook will look like.

Kindle will not natively support epub until you can connect it to a USB cable, transfer an epub using a file manager, and it does not get secretly converted.

Re: Standard Ebooks

#105

Post by contrarian1234 »

boznz wrote: post #103
contrarian1234 wrote: post #100

There are HTML versions but they don't seem to reflow example: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/rudolph-erich-raspe/the-su... A bit offtopic, but I never understood why .epub is a thing. For instance the linked HTML/XHTML version seems to work just fine (except for the reflow thing.. but I assume that a CSS issue) .epub seems to be mostly HTML with a few pieces missing. I guess I don't understand why we needed a new…

epub is just a collection of zipped HTML, CSS FONTS and images and as bog standard as you can get. You can open it with a Zip extractor and see.

Huh.. yeah.. so then why doesn't Firefox/Chrome open it?

Re: Standard Ebooks

#106

Post by paulcole »

dimmke wrote: post #91
paulcole wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was $3 would you buy it today?

Because there are high quality alternatives that are free and have no DRM there's no price point I would buy it. The only scenario I would is if I wanted to read a specific translation. A physical copy if I wanted one I'd be willing to pay ~$6 for, less if used.

If there’s no price point at which you’d buy it why weigh in with what you believe a reasonable price to be?

Re: Standard Ebooks

#107

Post by boznz »

contrarian1234 wrote: post #105
boznz wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

epub is just a collection of zipped HTML, CSS FONTS and images and as bog standard as you can get. You can open it with a Zip extractor and see.

Huh.. yeah.. so then why doesn't Firefox/Chrome open it?

Chrome opens the html pages fine once the epub is unzipped. Some epubs may however have DRM I dont have any of those but they probably wont work.

Re: Standard Ebooks

#108

Post by devashishp »

weijiacheng wrote: post #59
devashishp wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious, why do you have a policy against hosting religious books?

The site actually hosts several "religious books" (try filtering by the "Spirituality" tag -- I've even produced several books on religious topics myself for SE). What it doesn't host are "Religious texts from modern world religions" (what some might call "scriptures," e.g. the Bible or the Quran) which is a much narrower category than "religious books." As a religious person myself, I actually think this policy is v…

I think that makes sense, but it still seems a bit arbitrary, I don’t see bookshops having these issues

Re: Standard Ebooks

#109

Post by bentley »

chrismorgan wrote: post #101
bentley wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sen…

Sometimes capitalisation matters are close to purely stylistic, but other times they really are part of the content, guiding pronunciation or emphasis, so that lowercasing them harms the work. What is your opinion of my assessment in the above comment of some of the specific changes in https://github.com/standardebooks/charles-dickens_a-christma... >?

I haven’t looked into your example, but certainly it can be true that lowercasing can be harmful. It goes without saying, I think, that the SE policy is only to lowercase words when doing so doesn’t harm.

When I see erroneous changes in SE books, I argue to revert, and have generally been successful. In my experience it’s drama‐free, like fixing any other typo.

Re: Standard Ebooks

#110

Post by aorth »

crabmusket wrote: post #55
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 so much for the work you and the whole team, and the contributing community, do! I've read a bunch of classics thanks to your editions, and have donated in the past. This post is a reminder for me to do so again!

Came to say the same. I have a recurring donation set up and I'm always happy to see updates and mentions of the project.
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