Standard Ebooks: Free public-domain ebooks, carefully produced

Post by Tinned_Tuna » Sat, Aug 03, 2019, 7:05 AM UTC

Post by rand84545 » Sat, Aug 03, 2019, 8:03 AM UTC

mhxion wrote: post #4

> Other free ebooks don’t put much effort into professional-quality typography: they use "straight" quotes instead of “curly” quotes, they ignore details like em- and en-dashes, and they look more like early-90’s web pages instead of actual books. True. I hope you guys get proper funding and keep this project on. Contribute: https://standardebooks.org/contribute/ (I was thinking a Slack or Discord would be better tha…

Post by hollander » Sat, Aug 03, 2019, 9:31 AM UTC

andrepd wrote: post #92

mhxion wrote: post #4

> Other free ebooks don’t put much effort into professional-quality typography: they use "straight" quotes instead of “curly” quotes, they ignore details like em- and en-dashes, and they look more like early-90’s web pages instead of actual books. True. I hope you guys get proper funding and keep this project on. Contribute: https://standardebooks.org/contribute/ (I was thinking a Slack or Discord would be better tha…

Why would you force people to use nonfree proprietary software in order to contribute to an open project?

Post by the_duke » Sat, Aug 03, 2019, 9:56 AM UTC

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #30

kevinh wrote: post #2

It's great that these are in a consistent formatting style. When trying to extract some contents programmatically from some Gutenberg texts, I kept running into different formatting styles. That combined with being able to check out the entire repository makes it much simpler to do data processing on the works. And, of course, fixing more errors is of course a noble goal. Are these corrections going to make it upstre…

> Are these corrections going to make it upstream to Gutenberg? It's an issue worth raising to the team. In the spirit of GPL, I think reporting any instances of clear typos in the source text upstream would be a good idea. The problem is that so much work is done to the text as part of StandardEbook production that we can't exactly just submit a single patch or diff. It would be difficult to identify the textual cor…

Post by StavrosK » Sat, Aug 03, 2019, 10:23 AM UTC

robin_reala wrote: post #99

sdrothrock wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was hoping I could contribute financially, which could help fund any software or hosting costs they have, but it doesn't look like they're accepting donations (which is also fine, and completely their prerogative). But! If someone from SE is reading this and it turns out that you just don't have a way to donate because it doesn't seem like people will donate, definitely put a paypal button or something out there. :…

We have minimal hosting costs (ebooks are small) and no software costs, so the rest is just down to time. Luckily, the majority of the process is proof reading, which it turns out people quite enjoy doing regardless, and is easily parallelisable our across multiple contributors. So so far not need for contributions, and it makes things simpler to not need them.