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Standard Ebooks

standardebooks.org

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Re: Standard Ebooks

#131

Post by weijiacheng »

mahalex wrote: post #125
pasc1878 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

One of the funny things about Bible translations is that more modern translations are based on older manuscripts than older translations, due to advances in archeology. SE can't carry any translations that incorporate the insights of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and having access to some of the oldest Hebrew manuscripts is a pretty big deal when it comes to translating the Tanakh.

It's true, modern versions of War and Peace can't be hosted at SE, but those modern versions generally don't reflect revolutionary leaps in archeology :)

Re: Standard Ebooks

#132

Post by knbknb »

Who decides or sets the difficulty level of "reading ease" (which is a sortable metadata attribute on the search page) ?

Some classiications seem a bit ...nonintuitive. For example, the Autobiography of John Stuart Mill is classified as "very diffcult" whereas "The Tempest" by Shakespeare is classified as "fairly easy".

I would classify it the other way around, but what do I know, I'm a nonnative speaker anyway.

Re: Standard Ebooks

#133

Post by squigz »

pauloxnet wrote: post #74
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 (This post is slightly out of date as there is a database now; but it's used for managing Patrons - and soon a cover art listing and approval system - not for serving the actual ebooks, which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…

Hi Alex, I shared the SE link here to help with donations and I hope it's working. Thank you for your beautiful project. For a few years, every January 1st, for public domain day, I have been promoting SE on social media, the thread on Mastodon is the one with the most involvement. https://fosstodon.org/@paulox/111680544393923401 It would be nice to have an SE account on Mastodon that posts about every new book publi…

For what it's worth, they have an Atom feed - https://standardebooks.org/feeds/atom/new-releases

Re: Standard Ebooks

#134

Post by TheCoelacanth »

boznz wrote: post #102
NelsonMinar wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pear…

If you want to go to the work of creating a curated selection of high-quality, contemporary, self-published, public domain books no one is stopping you.

That's not the niche SE has chosen to target. You can't expect them to serve every possible use case.

Re: Standard Ebooks

#135

Post by robin_reala »

knbknb wrote: post #132

Who decides or sets the difficulty level of "reading ease" (which is a sortable metadata attribute on the search page) ? Some classiications seem a bit ...nonintuitive. For example, the Autobiography of John Stuart Mill is classified as "very diffcult" whereas "The Tempest" by Shakespeare is classified as "fairly easy". I would classify it the other way around, but what do I know, I'm a nonnative speaker anyway.

We use the Flesch Reading Ease algorithm. You can find the implementation at https://github.com/standardebooks/tools/blob/master/se/forma...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readabi...

Re: Standard Ebooks

#136

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

carlosjobim wrote: post #60
acabal wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do offer azw3 files for all of our books. https://standardebooks.org/help/how-to-use-our-ebooks#kindle...

Yes, Amazon has changed the game and they only allow downloads in .AZW, .PRC, .MOBI or .TXT format now. I understand that this is their fault and not yours, but maybe it could be interesting for you to offer one of these formats now that the Kindle browser is actually usable?

> they only allow downloads in .AZW

Do they actually check the file content or just the name?

If the latter, just a .AZW alias to the actual .AZW3 might work ...

(I can't test, don't have a Kindle nowadays)

Re: Standard Ebooks

#137

Post by carlosjobim »

B1FF_PSUVM wrote: post #136
carlosjobim wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, Amazon has changed the game and they only allow downloads in .AZW, .PRC, .MOBI or .TXT format now. I understand that this is their fault and not yours, but maybe it could be interesting for you to offer one of these formats now that the Kindle browser is actually usable?

> they only allow downloads in .AZW Do they actually check the file content or just the name? If the latter, just a .AZW alias to the actual .AZW3 might work ... (I can't test, don't have a Kindle nowadays)

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

Re: Standard Ebooks

#138

Post by kjartanThor »

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 people) there is no comparable entity and most likely never will be, so the best and probably only way to get something similar would be to be a part of a larger organization.

Re: Standard Ebooks

#139

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

carlosjobim wrote: post #137
B1FF_PSUVM wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they only allow downloads in .AZW Do they actually check the file content or just the name? If the latter, just a .AZW alias to the actual .AZW3 might work ... (I can't test, don't have a Kindle nowadays)

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.

Re: Standard Ebooks

#140

Post by robin_reala »

kjartanThor wrote: post #138

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 least get the first few productions off the ground.

[1] https://standardebooks.org/manual

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