I’ve only read a handful of books from Standard Ebook, but they’ve all been amazing quality ebooks — better than some ebooks I’ve paid for through an Amazon Kindle back in the day.
These folks keep an RSS (love it) with each new book they add to the collection. The hoarder/collector in me likes to have all these perfectly formatted books and thanks to the hardworking people at SE I have, and you can too, some 700 classics for free!
Hi, I am curious if you might consider publishing directly to the stores (Kindle) as a free book (or $0.99). It would make it easier for people to access. I am an engineer but failed to try and get a kindle book downloaded and read last night after seeing your post. So I imagine your work is out of grasp to all but the most technical who have a computer handy. I was 100% on my phone (no computer to upload), and I just couldn't figure it out and gave up. I would support you over other publishers.
My wife is an admin on the PG project. She puts in a lot of effort to keep the site secure. I think they welcome efforts like yours, and reuse is part of why they exist! They also research the copyrights, to make sure they are clear to share.
I use Project Gutenberg a lot personally, and in fact I'm using one of their books as a study for my upcoming startup:
One thing I really like about the PG site is that a few years ago they removed most of the JavaScript, which IMO makes it more usable. I haven't looked at Standard Ebooks yet, but I look forward to. Thanks!
One book I'd like to see on Standard Ebooks is "The Flying Girl", which my wife and I just read and loved. It's by L. Frank Baum (The Wizard of Oz), and is about a flying startup in 1911, which I previously posted on HN:
Love this project! I’ve read several books from Project Gutenberg and owe a great deal to the project. I love seeing this extension of it and will be sure to avail myself of it and possibly contribute one day!
Not a question, so much as a suggestion from an interested netizen: it would be great to see changes flowed back up to Gutenberg. I know they have a process for submitting updates - I’ve made several to The Wealth of Nations myself.
Thanks for sharing the project, and I look forward to my next read!
It’s down to the producer, but 95% of the SE books I produce have changes upstreamed to PG. There’s no competition between us: we both serve different niches.
In general, I love the format, however I notice that (for example), Hugh Lofting's "The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle" has none of Lofting's illustrations - which seems a shame in a children's book - is this a deliberate policy choice?
Do you have any plans to support (and accept contributions to) non-English books? It’ll be amazing to see original Russian classic texts redone with the same level of care.
This is a common request and the answer is unfortunately no. Typography varies across languages and we are only experts in English typography. People have tried to start up various SE-like projects for other languages, but as far as I know none have taken off.
What a great project! Would you have a need for a veteran web dev who also happened to be an English major? Took a look at the volunteer page, but nothing jumped out.
Absolutely! Creating epub ebooks is basically creating web pages. Epubs are just zipped up XHTML files, with exactly the same semantic structure and CSS styling you'd find on a well-made web page. That makes web devs with English majors our ideal type of volunteer!
Check out our step by step guide to creating an ebook[1] and then our Wanted Ebook list[2] for some good first-time productions. Then send a note to our mailing list and we'll help you through it.
Creating an ebook is a very satisfying endeavor - I always say it's like building your own lightsaber.
* Have you considered putting the books onto the official store? It would make it much smoother to get books on the device. You could charge a small fee to pay for the effort, I’d pay the extra to support the project and avoid the hassle of doing an upload. I just saw above you now do bulk downloads, which will help also.
* Although your covers are beautiful, they only appear in a small corner of the screen for the Kobo devices I’ve used, even using the Kepub format, is that a known issue?
And also to thank you for the effort. This project plays a really important role and has been a source of pleasure for many of my friends and family.
We've been in touch with Kobo but they haven't expressed a lot of interest. We do have an integration with the Google Play store, so if you search for an ebook we have in our catalog, it should appear near the top.
I use a Kobo eink device myself and haven't noticed the cover art problem you're describing. Make sure you're on the latest firmware, and that you're transferring our kepub files using a USB cable and not Calibre. (Calibre may attempt to apply their own conversion on top of our own conversion, which can result in unexpected things happening.)
I'm getting old and my eye sight is going. Are there any read-a-loud options you can recommend? The Edge browser does a decent job on PDF's in a voice you can select, but it's kind of hacky for an entire book.
Wikiart and Artvee are good places to start cover art research. Many museums now have explicit CC0 collections, too.
Finding good public domain cover art can be extremely time consuming - it's the part of the process most likely to make a new contributor give up. But when you find a great cover, it feels great!
I don't keep count but over the years I'd say the number is in the several hundreds, including one-time volunteers. We do have a core set of what we call "editors", who are volunteers in charge of managing individual productions, along with a solid amount of repeat contributors who work on ebooks as they feel like it.
I think people participate because it feels good to make something of quality, and then give it away. If you're passionate about literature, then you get to read a lot of great stuff while you're doing it, too.
Yes, the advanced epubs are just the zipped source repo, which is epub 3.2, including any "advanced" CSS selectors and so on. "Advanced" here just means that the epubs are written with a modern web rendering engine in mind, while most ereading platforms in the wild are still at an IE6 level of CSS/HTML rendering support.
The "compatible" epub is the same epub, but with various compatibility enhancements automatically added for different ereading platforms.
Currently only web browsers can render the advanced epubs at 100% fidelity. iBooks might be the only non-browser ereading platform that does a pretty good job with the advanced epubs, as I believe it uses modern Webkit as its renderer. For any other ereader, use the compatible epubs. (Or kepubs for Kobo.)
Thoughts on introducing some kind of popularity/rank sort? I.e., number of on-site downloads, off-site citations or some book-equivalent-IMDB. Is it a conscious choice not to have one or just feature prioritization?
The site looks lovely and I think it's great to have classic books properly formatted for e-readers, I've snatched up the ones that were sitting on my reading list for a while, but I find it unfortunate that it's a bit rough to find new things. I guess that mimics the feeling of a library, where books are grouped by broad genre but only alphabetical (or random) within, but I feel like it would be useful if it had some kind of pointers for discovery.
I'd be open to that but there's limited time in the day! If a volunteer wants to discuss making it happen, send a note to our mailing list or open a GitHub issue and we can talk about it.
Have any of the ebooks included any serious math? I see that MathML is the expectation, but I wonder if the rules around the math aren't just ignored because of the rest of the culture around which books are selected and worked on.
Indeed, in academic writing I never see MathML used in an HMTL setting, it's always MathJax or KaTeX. For your purposes this is probably fine, but imagining if someone wanted to author a high quality math textbook following the same standard I would wager they'd run into a brick wall
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, and A Tangled Tale are probably our most MathML-heavy books.
Books from the PD era are not very likely to feature math serious enough to require MathML. This is probably for the best... MathML support in ereaders is poor, with the exception of iBooks and Kobo. Raw MathML is retained in our "advanced" epubs, but it's converted to PNGs in our "compatible" epubs, for this reason.
I saw you mentioned using a Kobo eink device. Is that what you would recommend? It seems the 11th gen Kindle Paperwhite and Kobo Libra 2 are pretty comparable. I'd like to support a non-Amazon product, but it also looks like I can get 20% off a new Kindle by trading in my very old Kindle Touch, making the Kobo effectively $50-60 more expensive...
The Book of Wonder is a series of weird short stories, some of them gloomy and pessimistic but many with a thread of dark humor. "Chu-bu and Sheemish" is one of my all-time favorite short stories - it's creative and hilarious. [1]
I also liked A Voyage to Arcturus, which has become a modern cult classic. It's probably my favorite book I've read for SE, though it might be a little heavy for a "beach read." [2]
P. G. Wodehouse is always a good bet for lighter reading. [3]
The Martian books are also light swashbuckling sci-fi. [4]
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is considered to be one of the best murder mysteries ever written. [5]
Would you consider creating a Goodreads collection/list of all the books in Standard Ebooks? Though I can appreciate if it's too much work to curate or manage.
We did have one volunteer adding items to Goodreads as we produced them, but the process was manual and very tedious, and the ROI was questionable at best. So IIRC he no longer does that. I'm not against the idea but someone has to volunteer to pick up the task.
There are no guarantees in life, but as long as I'm at the helm I hope to avoid spam!
We do accept donations because as SE becomes more popular and attracts more contributors, managing the project is approaching the time required for a full-time job.
The vast majority come from PG. When they don't it's another public domain transcription source, like Wikisource, Faded Page, or Project Gutenberg Australia. We usually don't create our own transcriptions.
Our producers can and do contribute back upstream! It's up to the individual producer.
Might be a stupid question but in France books over 50 years of age ended up "free" (to read not to exploit), does it work the same way on all countries? Does it mean we can access books that are over 50 years in your platform or even GP?
Line height is set to the browser/ereader default - it's not something we change as it depends on the font. Font size is also the ereader default, though if viewing in a web browser we increase it slightly.
Would you accept novel translations of non-English classics? The policy suggests yes, but I imagine such a work would fall under US copyright (which the policy forbids).
If by "novel" you mean "modern", then potentially, but they would have to be actually good translations, and released to the public domain via CC0. We only work on public domain books.
If you wanted to create an ebook from scratch, how would you do this? Would you write plain html. Would you write markdown, and convert it? What tools would you use?
Have you considered adding A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates to the collection? It's quite the thriller -- every page is a surprise and you will never guess what happens next!
I may be seeing this thorough a “sensitive” lens, but the language on the website feels like it’s bashing Project Gutenberg in order to show SE’s strengths.
> Ebook projects like Project Gutenberg transcribe ebooks and make them available for the widest number of reading devices. Standard Ebooks takes ebooks from sources like Project Gutenberg, formats and typesets them using a carefully designed and professional-grade style manual...
> Other free ebooks (which PG has already been highlighted as being in that category) don’t put much effort into professional-quality typography
It can be a very difficult task to compare without criticism. It’s clear that SE does put care and attention in to all the things mentioned with the goal of creating an excellent edition, I just think that PG has well-earned the respect they have for doing what they do well: getting so many books in to so many hands. As highlighted in the page and in your comments here: PG and SE fill different needs so there is room for both to stand tall.
That doesn't strike me as "bashing", it strikes me as contrasting different focuses.
PG is going for breadth—as many public domain books on as many devices as possible. Standard Ebooks are going for depth—a very quality of typesetting for each book.
Bashing? The goals of each project are different and compliment each other. I am almost positive the folks at PG encourage projects like Standard Ebooks.
This is the worst part about libgen as well... no way to navigate or sift through the horribly formatted epubs out there :( tons don't even have a TOC it makes me so sad
Curious: Since Standard Ebooks uses Project Gutenberg's work, why not contribute back instead of 'fork' to a separate project? Are there obstacles preventing this or making it less than desirable?
Our editions are totally different than what PG does, our goals are different, our technical approach is different, and our collections policy is different. We would rather have our own curated catalog on our own website, than be another edition lost among many in PG's huge catalog.
PG does great work and we rely on them almost exclusively for transcriptions. But we're two friends working towards to different goals.
Would it be possible to contribute back the corrections from proofreading so that others could benefit, if not some of the fancier formatting/fonts/etc.? Or is that prohibitively difficult due to what is effectively a one-way conversion from PG to your own format?
PG does great work and we rely on them almost exclusively for transcriptions
Until I got to this part of the comment I was thinking "Yay, an alternative to PG's godawful OCR transcriptions". Why would you reuse the worst part of Project Gutenberg?
May I ask why you felt rudeness was appropriate here?
I had read the link and it was not obvious upon reading it why contributing back to Project Gutenberg did not make sense for them. In particular, I did not understand why it would not be desirable to contribute back corrections to the text to the "upstream" and original source so that others could also benefit - I did not see any contradiction between doing so and the goals/benefits stated on their page.
This seems to be primarily talking about sending web articles.
How does it work with SE Books? Are you able to do it wirelessly while still maintaining the azw3 features given SE's Kindle FAQ indicating it doesn't work with send to Kindle[0].
You're right. Sending web articles & newsletter has been my primary use-case. I haven't updated my marketing pages yet.
> How does it work with SE Books?
To use KTool with SE Books, you need to install the browser extension[0]. Then you can browse standardebooks.org, find the ebook you love, click KTool > Send to Kindle and it will send the _epub_ version to your device. The quality of the epub ebook is pretty good, actually. Here is a screenshot[1]
> Are you able to do it wirelessly while still maintaining the azw3 features given SE's Kindle FAQ indicating it doesn't work with send to Kindle
Yes. It's less straight-forward though. First, you need to update your settings to "preferAZW3"[2]. Then, instead of sending the epub version, KTool sends a document with a download button (link to the AZW3 ebook file). Tapping that button to download the high-quality ebook to your device. Screenshot[3]
Happy to support if you running into any issues (my email in profile)
Readit News
These folks keep an RSS (love it) with each new book they add to the collection. The hoarder/collector in me likes to have all these perfectly formatted books and thanks to the hardworking people at SE I have, and you can too, some 700 classics for free!
I use Project Gutenberg a lot personally, and in fact I'm using one of their books as a study for my upcoming startup:
https://github.com/carter-brothers/hand-propped#first-stage-...
One thing I really like about the PG site is that a few years ago they removed most of the JavaScript, which IMO makes it more usable. I haven't looked at Standard Ebooks yet, but I look forward to. Thanks!
One book I'd like to see on Standard Ebooks is "The Flying Girl", which my wife and I just read and loved. It's by L. Frank Baum (The Wizard of Oz), and is about a flying startup in 1911, which I previously posted on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32142757
Make sure to thank your wife on my behalf for her hard work at PG!
Not a question, so much as a suggestion from an interested netizen: it would be great to see changes flowed back up to Gutenberg. I know they have a process for submitting updates - I’ve made several to The Wealth of Nations myself.
Thanks for sharing the project, and I look forward to my next read!
Check out our step by step guide to creating an ebook[1] and then our Wanted Ebook list[2] for some good first-time productions. Then send a note to our mailing list and we'll help you through it.
Creating an ebook is a very satisfying endeavor - I always say it's like building your own lightsaber.
[1] https://standardebooks.org/contribute/producing-an-ebook-ste...
[2] https://standardebooks.org/contribute/wanted-ebooks
* Have you considered putting the books onto the official store? It would make it much smoother to get books on the device. You could charge a small fee to pay for the effort, I’d pay the extra to support the project and avoid the hassle of doing an upload. I just saw above you now do bulk downloads, which will help also.
* Although your covers are beautiful, they only appear in a small corner of the screen for the Kobo devices I’ve used, even using the Kepub format, is that a known issue?
And also to thank you for the effort. This project plays a really important role and has been a source of pleasure for many of my friends and family.
I use a Kobo eink device myself and haven't noticed the cover art problem you're describing. Make sure you're on the latest firmware, and that you're transferring our kepub files using a USB cable and not Calibre. (Calibre may attempt to apply their own conversion on top of our own conversion, which can result in unexpected things happening.)
Wikiart and Artvee are good places to start cover art research. Many museums now have explicit CC0 collections, too.
Finding good public domain cover art can be extremely time consuming - it's the part of the process most likely to make a new contributor give up. But when you find a great cover, it feels great!
I think people participate because it feels good to make something of quality, and then give it away. If you're passionate about literature, then you get to read a lot of great stuff while you're doing it, too.
The "compatible" epub is the same epub, but with various compatibility enhancements automatically added for different ereading platforms.
Currently only web browsers can render the advanced epubs at 100% fidelity. iBooks might be the only non-browser ereading platform that does a pretty good job with the advanced epubs, as I believe it uses modern Webkit as its renderer. For any other ereader, use the compatible epubs. (Or kepubs for Kobo.)
The site looks lovely and I think it's great to have classic books properly formatted for e-readers, I've snatched up the ones that were sitting on my reading list for a while, but I find it unfortunate that it's a bit rough to find new things. I guess that mimics the feeling of a library, where books are grouped by broad genre but only alphabetical (or random) within, but I feel like it would be useful if it had some kind of pointers for discovery.
Indeed, in academic writing I never see MathML used in an HMTL setting, it's always MathJax or KaTeX. For your purposes this is probably fine, but imagining if someone wanted to author a high quality math textbook following the same standard I would wager they'd run into a brick wall
Books from the PD era are not very likely to feature math serious enough to require MathML. This is probably for the best... MathML support in ereaders is poor, with the exception of iBooks and Kobo. Raw MathML is retained in our "advanced" epubs, but it's converted to PNGs in our "compatible" epubs, for this reason.
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ludwig-wittgenstein/tracta...
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/charles-babbage/passages-f...
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/lewis-carroll/a-tangled-ta...
I also liked A Voyage to Arcturus, which has become a modern cult classic. It's probably my favorite book I've read for SE, though it might be a little heavy for a "beach read." [2]
P. G. Wodehouse is always a good bet for lighter reading. [3]
The Martian books are also light swashbuckling sci-fi. [4]
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is considered to be one of the best murder mysteries ever written. [5]
[1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/lord-dunsany/the-book-of-w...
[2] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/david-lindsay/a-voyage-to-...
[3] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/p-g-wodehouse
[4] https://standardebooks.org/collections/martian
[5] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/agatha-christie/the-murder...
A personal favorite of mine is Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/jules-verne/around-the-wor...
Edit — oh, is this the list? https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/140305.Standard_Ebooks
Love your project, thank you!
We do accept donations because as SE becomes more popular and attracts more contributors, managing the project is approaching the time required for a full-time job.
2. When you proofread and fix typos, do you contribute the fixes back upstream?
Our producers can and do contribute back upstream! It's up to the individual producer.
Would you accept novel translations of non-English classics? The policy suggests yes, but I imagine such a work would fall under US copyright (which the policy forbids).
Deleted Comment
Have you considered adding A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates to the collection? It's quite the thriller -- every page is a surprise and you will never guess what happens next!
Deleted Comment
> Ebook projects like Project Gutenberg transcribe ebooks and make them available for the widest number of reading devices. Standard Ebooks takes ebooks from sources like Project Gutenberg, formats and typesets them using a carefully designed and professional-grade style manual...
> Other free ebooks (which PG has already been highlighted as being in that category) don’t put much effort into professional-quality typography
It can be a very difficult task to compare without criticism. It’s clear that SE does put care and attention in to all the things mentioned with the goal of creating an excellent edition, I just think that PG has well-earned the respect they have for doing what they do well: getting so many books in to so many hands. As highlighted in the page and in your comments here: PG and SE fill different needs so there is room for both to stand tall.
PG is going for breadth—as many public domain books on as many devices as possible. Standard Ebooks are going for depth—a very quality of typesetting for each book.
The flabbergasting quality (or absence thereof) of ebooks I purchase on Amazon is regularly driving me nuts.
Particularly forced justified layout (lacking hypenation, no less) – on a mobile phone. Wtf? Don't get me even started about the ‘typography’.
Great to see there are other people who care about these things.
PG does great work and we rely on them almost exclusively for transcriptions. But we're two friends working towards to different goals.
Until I got to this part of the comment I was thinking "Yay, an alternative to PG's godawful OCR transcriptions". Why would you reuse the worst part of Project Gutenberg?
I had read the link and it was not obvious upon reading it why contributing back to Project Gutenberg did not make sense for them. In particular, I did not understand why it would not be desirable to contribute back corrections to the text to the "upstream" and original source so that others could also benefit - I did not see any contradiction between doing so and the goals/benefits stated on their page.
Uneven, but some contributors generate very good quality ebooks, and there's some unique stuff in collections and omnibus editions.
Shameless plug: I build this little tool[0] to make it a little easier to send SE ebooks to your Kindle. Give it a try if you're a Kindle owner.
[0]: https://ktool.io
How does it work with SE Books? Are you able to do it wirelessly while still maintaining the azw3 features given SE's Kindle FAQ indicating it doesn't work with send to Kindle[0].
[0]: https://standardebooks.org/help/how-to-use-our-ebooks#kindle...
> How does it work with SE Books?
To use KTool with SE Books, you need to install the browser extension[0]. Then you can browse standardebooks.org, find the ebook you love, click KTool > Send to Kindle and it will send the _epub_ version to your device. The quality of the epub ebook is pretty good, actually. Here is a screenshot[1]
> Are you able to do it wirelessly while still maintaining the azw3 features given SE's Kindle FAQ indicating it doesn't work with send to Kindle
Yes. It's less straight-forward though. First, you need to update your settings to "preferAZW3"[2]. Then, instead of sending the epub version, KTool sends a document with a download button (link to the AZW3 ebook file). Tapping that button to download the high-quality ebook to your device. Screenshot[3]
Happy to support if you running into any issues (my email in profile)
[0]: https://ktool.io/install
[1]: https://twitter.com/daniel_nguyenx/status/155152385925356748...
[2]: https://ktool.io/app/extension?settings
[3]: https://twitter.com/daniel_nguyenx/status/155171706234696908...