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Standard Ebooks

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Re: Standard Ebooks

#121

Post by pasc1878 »

devashishp wrote: post #108
weijiacheng wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Part of the issue would be that the nooks are translations and the copywriter data would be from the translation date.

So modern versions of e.g. the Bible could not be in Standard Ebooks. So easiest to not carry any translations.

Bookshops have no problem with this as part of the purchase price will go to the copyright owners of the translation.

Re: Standard Ebooks

#122

Post by mahalex »

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…

> Most (nearly all?) religious texts of major world religions were originally written in languages other than English, and so if SE were to try to host those texts the site would have to make an editorial call about which translations of those texts are the "best."

The site already hosts a number of works that were originally written in languages other than English, and yet it had no problems making an editorial call about which translations of those texts are the "best." The obvious solution would be to just allowing multiple translations of foreign-language books.

Re: Standard Ebooks

#123

Post by [deleted] »

ebooks-ta wrote: post #20
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…

Do you have any thoughts on providing manually pre-formatted PDF files? Em-dashes, curly quotes, etc. are all nice, it's a step in the right direction, but in the end the EPUB file needs to be interpreted by the ebook reader on the fly and in terms of typesetting quality the outcome is far from what physical books provide, since you still get orphans, weird hyphenations, ugly/misaligned chapter titles. For me, nothin…

[deleted]

Re: Standard Ebooks

#124

Post by azangru »

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…

> Most (nearly all?) religious texts of major world religions were originally written in languages other than English, and so if SE were to try to host those texts the site would have to make an editorial call about which translations of those texts are the "best."

Is there a technical reason to disallow multiple translations of the same text? I can see on the "wanted ebooks" page a number of translated titles[0]; so the project does seem to make editorial decisions about which translations to work on. Obviously, where one translation exists, there may be others that have other advantages.

[0] - https://standardebooks.org/contribute/wanted-ebooks

Re: Standard Ebooks

#125

Post by mahalex »

pasc1878 wrote: post #121
devashishp wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Part of the issue would be that the nooks are translations and the copywriter data would be from the translation date. So modern versions of e.g. the Bible could not be in Standard Ebooks. So easiest to not carry any translations. Bookshops have no problem with this as part of the purchase price will go to the copyright owners of the translation.

Modern versions of e.g. Tolstoy's "War and Peace" could not be in Standard Ebooks. So easiest to not carry any translations?

Re: Standard Ebooks

#126

Post by jcurtis »

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…

Editorial commits are all marked as such and contain no non-editorial changes. The tools for compiling ebook files are available at https://github.com/standardebooks/tools, so creating your own versions with only the work you're interested in is straightforward (and can be at least partially automated).

Re: Standard Ebooks

#127

Post by deadly-penguin »

acabal wrote: post #44
darkflame91 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a suggestion: You could optimize the website to be easily readable and navigable on the Kindle's web browser, and recommend it as an option. I've often found it to be the easiest way to get non-store books on my Kindle. I've also noticed that cover images are handled correctly when the ebook is downloaded straight onto the device, with no need for a separate image file. A hurdle for this though, is that buildi…

I believe our website does have some basic Kindle browser support. The problem, as you noted, is that Kindle's browser is terrible. I say the same thing in every ebook thread: On a purely technical level Kindle is a terrible ereader designed by people who seem to hate books. Buy almost anything else.

A jailbroken kindle is okay - they make an adequate PDF reader and they can be found easily for less than the alternatives, at least in Britain. I do agree they're somewhat poor when used as intended.

They're also quite a nice embedded ARM Linux machine for a lot less than I could make one or buy one from elsewhere, but I suspect that isn't the core market for a kindle...

Re: Standard Ebooks

#128

Post by Machado117 »

acabal wrote: post #44
darkflame91 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a suggestion: You could optimize the website to be easily readable and navigable on the Kindle's web browser, and recommend it as an option. I've often found it to be the easiest way to get non-store books on my Kindle. I've also noticed that cover images are handled correctly when the ebook is downloaded straight onto the device, with no need for a separate image file. A hurdle for this though, is that buildi…

I believe our website does have some basic Kindle browser support. The problem, as you noted, is that Kindle's browser is terrible. I say the same thing in every ebook thread: On a purely technical level Kindle is a terrible ereader designed by people who seem to hate books. Buy almost anything else.

What’s the problem with the kindle? I use an old paperwhite and I have no issues reading epubs in it that I send by email

Re: Standard Ebooks

#129

Post by robin_reala »

azangru wrote: post #124
weijiacheng wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Most (nearly all?) religious texts of major world religions were originally written in languages other than English, and so if SE were to try to host those texts the site would have to make an editorial call about which translations of those texts are the "best." Is there a technical reason to disallow multiple translations of the same text? I can see on the "wanted ebooks" page a number of translated titles[0]; so…

We try to pick the “best” translation that’s in the public domain in the US. Quite often, that’s a single translation unfortunately, but if there are multiple we do try to evaluate them from a readers point of view.

Re: Standard Ebooks

#130

Post by eigenvalue »

harwoodjp wrote: post #14

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

I made a tool like that, and I bet with a more powerful LLM like GPT4, and perhaps a better baseline OCR tool (like GPT4 vision), it could work really well for this sort of thing:

https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/llama2_aided_tesseract

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