Are there any good, open source e-readers out there?
I have good experience with FBReader for Android (from F-Droid). For some reason FBReader for Linux (from Debian) seems more problematic.
Standard Ebooks: Free public-domain ebooks, carefully produced
61–70 of 135 posts
Re: Standard Ebooks: Free public-domain ebooks, carefully produced
#62It'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…
Not all the sources come from Gutenberg for a start. But for those that do I usually keep a running list of proofing corrections as I go and submit them back. Gutenberg are pretty responsive to any changed submitted if you supply a link to source scans as well.
Re: Standard Ebooks: Free public-domain ebooks, carefully produced
#63Unfortunately none of the formats given work with Amazon's "email to kindle" system, which is the most convenient way to load books-- it allows you to download a PDF on your phone and send it to a special email address associated with your Kindle device. Considering all the work this site has already done preparing the book files, it seems like they might as well ought to generate PDF files using a page size roughly…
Amazon's "email to kindle" system also accepts books in the mobi format which would be a preferable to mapping pdf page sizes to Kindle reader screen sizes.
Re: Standard Ebooks: Free public-domain ebooks, carefully produced
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mailing lists are superior for async communications IMHO for endeavors such as this. Nothing needs to be addressed immediately (and as everyone is a volunteer, realistic expectations should be set for response latency; email helps that, Slack/Discord does not), and the mailing list archive is a natural log of conversations and decisions that are open and accessible (Free Slack only keeps 10k lines of conversation his…
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 soured on discord/slack/etc when their absurdly bad performance caused my laptop to get so hot it probably neutered me.
Seriously though, those services are fine on a powerful tower PC plugged into the wall, but if you're on the move on battery power, they are unbearable.
Re: Standard Ebooks: Free public-domain ebooks, carefully produced
#65I wonder if the azw3 files work with the Kindle's latest display engine? Specifically, can ragged-right be turned on? Are hyphenation hints embedded?
I don’t have a Kindle so haven’t tested, but I believe we build the AZW3 files from the epub2 ones, which have hyphenation baked in using the Python hyphenation library.
Re: Standard Ebooks: Free public-domain ebooks, carefully produced
#66Earlier 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…
What do you mean when you say "modern forums are fun to use"? I ask in 100% good faith and I am not being snarky.
Re: Standard Ebooks: Free public-domain ebooks, carefully produced
#67[flagged]
Without commenting on the contents, it wasn’t fully published in English until 1939, which means it doesn’t arrive into the US public domain for another 15 years. It’s also down to personal preference what people work on.
Re: Standard Ebooks: Free public-domain ebooks, carefully produced
#68Is there any way to download them all? Ebooks are very small so it shouldn't be a problem to make an archive, or at least have a way to use curl/wget to download them all from a directory.
There’s something called opds. Sort of like a file that defines a library and its contents. https://standardebooks.org/opds/ I’ve never really been able to get it to work with calibre, pretty much the standard go to piece of software for all things ebooks. I would be interested in hearing about any tips for getting an opds working.
For iOS there’s something called KyBook which reads that opds link and shows a list of books with cover art, book name, author and tags pertaining to the books subject matter. It does not allow one to search the opds library in anyway. I was able to download a book using the app, and from within the app move the book to iCloud. From within the Files app I found the KyBook folder, selected the book and using share opened it with iBooks and it is now in my iBooks collection. I found the app here https://www.maketecheasier.com/best-ebook-reader-ios/
Re: Standard Ebooks: Free public-domain ebooks, carefully produced
#69A book that might be of specific interest for HN’s audience is the recent production for Standard Ebooks I did of Charles Babbage’s autobiography:
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/charles-babbage/passages-f...
It covers a plethora of subjects, but devotes a few chapters to the Difference Engine and the political difficulties in getting it funded. Bonus MathML (rendered to PNGs in most readers but real for the Kobo), and all diagrams support both normal and white-on-black dark mode if you’re got your reader set up like that.
Re: Standard Ebooks: Free public-domain ebooks, carefully produced
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
What do you mean when you say "modern forums are fun to use"? I ask in 100% good faith and I am not being snarky.
They have all sorts of modern features more conducive to discussion and community-building like notifications that someone @mention/replied to you and even editing your post -- features that people generally like. If you don't think that's "fun", fair enough, but I also enumerated other benefits like their broader appeal.
Any community that only has a mailing list could benefit from experimenting with a proper forum. I've seen this experiment broaden a community time and time again as you move away from only selecting for the type of person who likes mailing lists. And notice that HN isn't a mailing list either.
For example, I would imagine that the sort of people interested in high-quality ebooks extend beyond mailing list loving super-techies. Even a subreddit would be a nice option.