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Standard Ebooks: Public Domain Day 2026 in Literature

standardebooks.org

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Re: Standard Ebooks: Public Domain Day 2026 in Literature

#41

Post by acabal »

jez wrote: post #40
robin_reala wrote: post #2

I’m a contributor – I did Kafka’s The Castle , Agatha Christie’s Giant’s Bread , and Stella Benson’s The Faraway Bride for this launch – and I’m happy to answer any questions about Standard Ebooks.

What’s the approach to embedding fonts in standard ebooks’ epubs? Curious whether there’s a set of fonts that producers are allowed to embed in finished books, or whether there’s project consciously avoids embedding fonts, and if so why. I tried to find a policy page on this via a standardebooks.org site search but nothing looked relevant. I’m asking after realizing that some of my favorite books were books where the…

The ebooks we produce are entirely in the US public domain, including metadata and any other files. Unfortunately there are basically no good fonts released under the CC0 license. (Most open fonts are released under the OFL license, which is not the same.) Therefore we don't embed any font files, except for Standard Blackletter[1] when necessary, which is a font we developed especially for our use based on public domain specimens, and released via the CC0 license.

[1] https://github.com/standardebooks/standard-blackletter

Re: Standard Ebooks: Public Domain Day 2026 in Literature

#42

Post by acabal »

me_jumper wrote: post #31
robin_reala wrote: post #2

I’m a contributor – I did Kafka’s The Castle , Agatha Christie’s Giant’s Bread , and Stella Benson’s The Faraway Bride for this launch – and I’m happy to answer any questions about Standard Ebooks.

I could not find out if there are outstanding todos that I could assign myself to as a newcomer. I'd like to contribute, but don't know where to start. Is there an issue board somewhere with missing books, or something else?

We have a list of wanted ebooks here: https://standardebooks.org/contribute/wanted-ebooks

First-time contributors should select something from the appropriate section, because that gives you the greatest chance of succeeding and the least burden on our reviewers as you get started.

Our toolset has a help wanted section and some outstanding issues: https://github.com/standardebooks/tools#help-wanted

Re: Standard Ebooks: Public Domain Day 2026 in Literature

#43

Post by acabal »

as1mov wrote: post #6
robin_reala wrote: post #2

I’m a contributor – I did Kafka’s The Castle , Agatha Christie’s Giant’s Bread , and Stella Benson’s The Faraway Bride for this launch – and I’m happy to answer any questions about Standard Ebooks.

Probably a dumb question, but how do you guys decide (and source) the book covers? I love how they look, but as a philistine can't put into words why. Also thanks for doing this, I've read a bunch of stuff (GK Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, Dashiell Hammett) that I wouldn't have otherwise if it weren't for this service.

As Robin mentioned the typical style is "fine art oil painting", with some wiggle room allowed for exceptionally difficult cases (like Asian-themed books, as there just wasn't much fine art on that subject pre-1930).

We also require that the art have some kind of connection to the book itself, so it's not just some random fine art. Sometimes the connection is a little fuzzy, but we do the best we can given that art must be pre-1930 and also must have been previously published.

(My personal favorite artwork selection of the books I worked on is The Communist Manifesto[1]. That painting was actually made specifically for a different book by Willa Cather[2], but I thought the peasant laborer, holding a sickle in one hand, with a faraway look in her eyes as the red sun rises behind her was just too good to pass up for Marx!)

1920ish was when it started becoming much more common for books to have illustrated dust jackets, so now that more books from that era and onwards are entering the public domain, we opt to use the first edition dust jacket if it's in the appropriate style. Fortunately for us, that era also happens to be the so-called Golden Age of Illustration so it's not hard finding beautiful art to use!

[1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/karl-marx_friedrich-engels...

[2] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/willa-cather/the-song-of-t...

Re: Standard Ebooks: Public Domain Day 2026 in Literature

#45

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

robin_reala wrote: post #2

I’m a contributor – I did Kafka’s The Castle , Agatha Christie’s Giant’s Bread , and Stella Benson’s The Faraway Bride for this launch – and I’m happy to answer any questions about Standard Ebooks.

>and I’m happy to answer any questions about Standard Ebooks.

When will they start assigning catalog numbers to each of their works in the way that Project Guteneberg does? I'd like a unique id per ebook and since you don't (for obvious reasons) use ISBNs, there's nothing really to be done. I can't use an OCLC id because Standard Ebooks aren't consistently listed in Worldcat, I can't use Bookbrainz or Open Library ids for the same reason.

It costs nothing and is a low-effort fix. It's been an industry (and library science) thing for decades or longer. Can Standard Ebooks finally stop the amateur hour crap?

Re: Standard Ebooks: Public Domain Day 2026 in Literature

#46

Post by acabal »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #45
robin_reala wrote: post #2

I’m a contributor – I did Kafka’s The Castle , Agatha Christie’s Giant’s Bread , and Stella Benson’s The Faraway Bride for this launch – and I’m happy to answer any questions about Standard Ebooks.

>and I’m happy to answer any questions about Standard Ebooks. When will they start assigning catalog numbers to each of their works in the way that Project Guteneberg does? I'd like a unique id per ebook and since you don't (for obvious reasons) use ISBNs, there's nothing really to be done. I can't use an OCLC id because Standard Ebooks aren't consistently listed in Worldcat, I can't use Bookbrainz or Open Library id…

I know you griped about this in a different thread, but we won't be doing that, sorry. You can uniquely identify an ebook and its version by using dc:identifier in combination with dcterms:modified in the metadata file. If you desperately need a filesystem-safe string then concatenate those two and sha it.

Re: Standard Ebooks: Public Domain Day 2026 in Literature

#47

Post by pastor_williams »

robin_reala wrote: post #2

I’m a contributor – I did Kafka’s The Castle , Agatha Christie’s Giant’s Bread , and Stella Benson’s The Faraway Bride for this launch – and I’m happy to answer any questions about Standard Ebooks.

Why don't the ebooks include any of the original illustrations? This makes the children's books in particular very unattractive.

Re: Standard Ebooks: Public Domain Day 2026 in Literature

#48

Post by robin_reala »

pastor_williams wrote: post #47
robin_reala wrote: post #2

I’m a contributor – I did Kafka’s The Castle , Agatha Christie’s Giant’s Bread , and Stella Benson’s The Faraway Bride for this launch – and I’m happy to answer any questions about Standard Ebooks.

Why don't the ebooks include any of the original illustrations? This makes the children's books in particular very unattractive.

We do include illustrations, but in fairly defined categories: when they’re factually illustrative, when they’re graphs or charts, when they’re part of the plot (an illustration of a clue in a murder mystery, for example), or when they’re referenced from the text.

The last point is why the Beatrix Potter compilation I did ended up with illustrations: the text specifically references the illustrations in a couple of the books (“Can you see…?”) so they remained. It did mean writing 602 pieces of alt text though[1] so it was a fairly major undertaking to include them.

[1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/beatrix-potter/short-ficti...

Re: Standard Ebooks: Public Domain Day 2026 in Literature

#49

Post by asveikau »

robin_reala wrote: post #2

I’m a contributor – I did Kafka’s The Castle , Agatha Christie’s Giant’s Bread , and Stella Benson’s The Faraway Bride for this launch – and I’m happy to answer any questions about Standard Ebooks.

What kind of features does "advanced epub" provide that "compatible epub" cannot?

Re: Standard Ebooks: Public Domain Day 2026 in Literature

#50

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

acabal wrote: post #46
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>and I’m happy to answer any questions about Standard Ebooks. When will they start assigning catalog numbers to each of their works in the way that Project Guteneberg does? I'd like a unique id per ebook and since you don't (for obvious reasons) use ISBNs, there's nothing really to be done. I can't use an OCLC id because Standard Ebooks aren't consistently listed in Worldcat, I can't use Bookbrainz or Open Library id…

I know you griped about this in a different thread, but we won't be doing that, sorry. You can uniquely identify an ebook and its version by using dc:identifier in combination with dcterms:modified in the metadata file. If you desperately need a filesystem-safe string then concatenate those two and sha it.

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