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Standard Ebooks

standardebooks.org

141–150 of 158 posts

Re: Standard Ebooks

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know. The Kindle browser doesn't have any copy and paste function, so it's difficult to work around any limitation.

I meant the SE site serving ".azw" files that are the same as the .azw3 - I understood that it's the Kindle browser that limits the downloads, right? Once the files are in the Kindle, it would probably work out OK.

Ah, I see. Great idea! I hope they see your comment.

Re: Standard Ebooks

#142
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 (This post is slightly out of date as there is a database now; but it's used for managing Patrons - and soon a cover art listing and approval system - not for serving the actual ebooks, which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…

Amazing that you don't use front-end javascript at all. Is there anything you wish HTML+CSS could do better?

Re XHTML - It looks like the website is being served with a text/html content type. Did you give up on your XHTML experiment? How did it go? Maybe it would help if browsers reported back errors to the server, like how "Content Security Policy" reporting works.

Re: Standard Ebooks

#143

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…

It seems like most of the Christian books on SE are Roman Catholic in orientation (Belloc, Chesterton, etc.) Pilgrim's Progress is a Protestant work, but it would be good to see a better representation of both pre-Reformation and Protestant titles.

Re: Standard Ebooks

#144

I have a question regarding books in other languages than English. Is there a technical reason for only allowing English or is it the legal aspect (knowing what is in public domain in countries other than the US) that hinders this? For example I live in Iceland there is a number of texts that are in the public domain, for example the Edda and Icelandic sagas among others. But since we are very few (approximately 380K…

It’s neither: it’s that our tooling and manual of style[1] is only developed for our specific conventions for English text. Other people have attempted to start alternative projects but getting that set of standards together takes time and effort, and like you say 380k people isn’t that many. If you do decide to start something then SE’s tooling supports a --white-label flag when creating a skeleton, which would at l…

Thank you for this, are your tools licensed in such a way that it would be ok to extend and adopt them so that they can be used for other languages?

Re: Standard Ebooks

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s neither: it’s that our tooling and manual of style[1] is only developed for our specific conventions for English text. Other people have attempted to start alternative projects but getting that set of standards together takes time and effort, and like you say 380k people isn’t that many. If you do decide to start something then SE’s tooling supports a --white-label flag when creating a skeleton, which would at l…

Thank you for this, are your tools licensed in such a way that it would be ok to extend and adopt them so that they can be used for other languages?

The code is GPL-3 and the templates are CC0: https://github.com/standardebooks/tools/blob/master/LICENSE....

Feel free to ask on the mailing list if you have any questions, more likely to be picked up there than in a random HN thread :)

Re: Standard Ebooks

#146
post #47
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Recommendations?

Onyx Boox. They run full Android, which means sync with Play Books, Kindle, Libby, etc.

Re: Standard Ebooks

#147

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.

> So modern versions of e.g. the Bible could not be in Standard Ebooks.

There are modern translations that are permissively licensed and are of surprisingly high quality. See the NET Bible as a prime example. It's also the only one I know of with good translation notes that can be had for free.

Re: Standard Ebooks

#148
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…

Amazing that you don't use front-end javascript at all. Is there anything you wish HTML+CSS could do better? Re XHTML - It looks like the website is being served with a text/html content type. Did you give up on your XHTML experiment? How did it go? Maybe it would help if browsers reported back errors to the server, like how "Content Security Policy" reporting works.

We never served as application/xhtml+xml. That has some nasty side effects in browsers, like no incremental rendering. But it’s always been legit to serve XHTML as text/html even if you lose the break-on-error functionality.

Re: Standard Ebooks

#149
post #143

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…

It seems like most of the Christian books on SE are Roman Catholic in orientation (Belloc, Chesterton, etc.) Pilgrim's Progress is a Protestant work, but it would be good to see a better representation of both pre-Reformation and Protestant titles.

Can you provide any specific recommendations?

Re: Standard Ebooks

#150
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like most of the Christian books on SE are Roman Catholic in orientation (Belloc, Chesterton, etc.) Pilgrim's Progress is a Protestant work, but it would be good to see a better representation of both pre-Reformation and Protestant titles.

Can you provide any specific recommendations?

Sure, how about some classics like:

The Didache

Anselm, Cur Deus Homo

Anselm, Proslogion

Augustine, City of God

Augustine, Confessions

Augustine, On Christian Doctrine

William Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life

Luther, The Bondage of the Will

Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion

Pascal, Pensées

All of these are in public domain.

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