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Standard Ebooks: Free public-domain ebooks, carefully produced

standardebooks.org

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Re: Standard Ebooks: Free public-domain ebooks, carefully produced

#21

Post by pkaye »

xrd wrote: post #9

I'm really curious why a book ( https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/charles-w-chesnutt/the-con... ) originally published in the US would need to include this: "This ebook is only thought to be free of copyright restrictions in the United States. It may still be under copyright in other countries. If you’re not located in the United States, you must check your local laws to verify that the contents of this ebook are fre…

A few countries had copyright terms longer than the US. For example Mexico is life of author + 100 years while US is life + 70 years.

Re: Standard Ebooks: Free public-domain ebooks, carefully produced

#24

Post by elkos »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #18
paulcarroty wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mailing lists was superior in 90's-00's, now when discourse/slack/discord/etc exists there's no reason to use ML except nostalgia. Parsing tons of new emails isn't easy. Also I'm prefer to avoid Google services 'cause privacy issues.

I like the combo of regular forum (Xenforo, Discourse, etc) and chat (Discord, Slack, etc). Unlike mailing lists, modern forums are actually usable, fun to use, and appealing. And chat provides a place for more conversational community-building. For example, the Elm community has both. The Discourse forum is technical and business-only yet there's a clean record of these discussions. The Slack chat is where I hang ou…

Well discourse forum and matrix chat bridged to IRC through riot.im works very effectively in our open source community.

Re: Standard Ebooks: Free public-domain ebooks, carefully produced

#25

Post by mfsch »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #19

Are there any plans to support languages beyond English?

It looks like they’ve decided not to publish any non-English books [1]. It’s a pity – I much prefer reading books in their original language if I’m able to understand it, and I was even considering contributing some German books to their collection. Maybe it would complicate the publishing process a bit though since different languages have different practices for things like punctuation.

[1]: https://standardebooks.org/contribute/accepted-ebooks

Re: Standard Ebooks: Free public-domain ebooks, carefully produced

#26

Post by ngold »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #13
kkarakk wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: Old mailing list conversations are difficult to parse and encourage a "ignore it until the issue goes away" mentality if no one is enforcing a reply rate. Mailing lists only really work for corporations imo

We're talking open source/free/non-profits here. No reply rate should be enforced unless by project owners (their time, their project, their rules). Some issues should be ignored until they go away. I myself ignore issues from some folks who engage me in my role as an open source tooling maintainer, after I have exhausted my patience working with them and they are not receptive to polite discussion. > Mailing lists o…

Fascinating subject. It seems like the difference between slack/discord and email, is the difference between a water cooler conversation and an actual sit down meeting.

Re: Standard Ebooks: Free public-domain ebooks, carefully produced

#28

Post by domoritz »

mfsch wrote: post #25
hombre_fatal wrote: post #19

Are there any plans to support languages beyond English?

It looks like they’ve decided not to publish any non-English books [1]. It’s a pity – I much prefer reading books in their original language if I’m able to understand it, and I was even considering contributing some German books to their collection. Maybe it would complicate the publishing process a bit though since different languages have different practices for things like punctuation. [1]: https://standardebooks.…

The tools are available. Maybe someone would be willing to make a similar project for other languages.

Re: Standard Ebooks: Free public-domain ebooks, carefully produced

#30

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

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 corrections from stylistic changes in an automatic way, unless we were to enforce typo corrections to occur in a single commit. We're currently encouraged to use an [Editorial] tag when modernizing spelling such as "any one" -> "anyone", so perhaps we should see about a [Transcription Error] tag for obvious typos.

The upshot is that all of the books' sources are hosted on GH. So an interested party could, in theory, review the commit history and pull out what look to be typo corrections. See, for example:

https://github.com/standardebooks/emile-gaboriau_the-lerouge...

Failing that, the contributor could simply manually keep track of any typos they fix and report them to GP.

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