Planet eBook – Classic literature publications formatted for popular devices | Hacker News Reader

Planet eBook – Classic literature publications formatted for popular devices

planetebook.com

152 pointssusam26 comments

Anyone interested in this should also check out https://standardebooks.org/ - they seem to have similar aims, and Standard Ebooks has a larger catalogue.

standardebooks also has much better quality - typography, metadata, table of contents etc. They have a proper styleguide as well.

See this simple comparison of what the metadata looks like for the same book (Kidnapped) - https://gist.github.com/captn3m0/ec44b93636b83c1b9f78bfc64a8...

However, due to how both these efforts are treating copyright - planetebook seems to have a better coverage of newer books (standardebooks doesn't have 1984 for eg).

At SE we go by US public domain laws, which typically are a little longer than in other parts of the world. Planet Ebooks are based on Australian public domain laws, so you can’t actually legally download 1984 in the US from them.

(On SE we have a warning that you need to check your own jurisdiction’s public domain laws; you aren’t legally allowed to download Peter and Wendy in the UK for example.)

A little more info on 1984. In Great Britain and most jurisdictions in the world, public domain kicks in 70 years after the death of the author. Orwell died in 1950, so all his corpus entered public domain at the beginning of this year. (In Australia, where these ebooks are hosted, the public domain for this period starts 50 years after the author’s death.)

In the US, the public domain system is different: works enter the public domain 95 years after the initial date of publication of that work. 1984 was published in 1949, so will arrive in the US public domain in 2044. For the next 24 years it’s illegal in the US to download a copy of the book that’s free by virtue of being in the public domain in a different jurisdiction.

This is a bit of an extreme example, as Orwell died just one year after 1984’s publication. In other situations it can work in reverse. For example, Thomas Mann died in 1955, so his works will typically enter the public domain in 2025. However, Der Zauberberg was published in 1924 so is now in the public domain under US law. This (among works by other authors) lead to Gutenberg being blocked in Germany as they weren’t willing to build a geoblocking system.

At the end of the day, if you want to stay legal (big assumption), it’s your responsibility to check PD in the jurisdiction you’re in. Going just by what websites claim is in the PD is not the best idea.

My favorite example of the gap between copyright jurisdictions is P. G. Wodehouse. He died in 1975, but published a lot of work before 1925, including a great many Jeeves and Wooster stories. So in his home country, his work won't be public domain until 2046, but in the U.S. there's plenty of public domain material. There's a similar story with Agatha Christie.

> In the US, the public domain system is different: works enter the public domain 95 years after the initial date of publication of that work.

It's more complicated than that. Works published from 1978 or later (when the 1976 Copyright Act kicked in) is life + 70 years. Works published before then are 95 dates from publication.

> It's more complicated than that. Works published from 1978 or later (when the 1976 Copyright Act kicked in) is life + 70 years. Works published before then are 95 dates from publication.

Actually, it's more complicated than that: for post-1978 works, life + 70 is for works of individual authors, 95 years is for works of corporate authorship.

Actually actually, it's even more complicated than that! Works published between 1925 and 1978 needed to file a copyright extension notice before the 28th anniversary of initial publication or the work fell into public domain.

Copyright law is a maze whose rules have changed numerous times over the decades. Here's a pretty good flowchart for U.S. copyright: https://www.sunsteinlaw.com/copyright-flowchart

Alex from SE here. Thanks for the mention!

From a quick glance I'm guessing that Planet eBook is just repackaging Project Gutenberg or PG Australia/Canada titles, or possibly even Internet Archive OCRs. A commenter below mentioned that italics in a book are in all caps, which is a common transcription affordance in PG texts. It seems they aren't proofread either, since on page 1 of Huck Finn there's a glaring OCR error that doesn't occur in the PG edition ("narra- tive"). And it looks like the PDFs have a Planet eBook watermark on every other page.

One of the goals of Standard Ebooks is to create ebooks that are commercial-level in quality, which after a glance I would say these are not. Our volunteers spend many hours making sure each ebook we release is a high-quality specimen in every way. And you don't get a watermark either.

We're always looking for contributors to make new ebooks. It's a satisfying effort because it takes a lot of different skills: HTML/CSS, command line/UNIX philosopy fluency, attention to detail, an eye for spotting typos, an interest in literature and fine art (for our covers), and more. If you'd like to work on an ebook to release to the world for free, send us a note!

Keep up the good work man!

I looked at the PDF and EPUB versions of “Down and Out in Paris and London” by George Orwell [0]. While the layout is nice, words that were in italics in the original [1] are rendered in ALL CAPS, which is a bit jarring.

[0] https://www.planetebook.com/down-and-out-in-paris-and-london...

[1] https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.208078/page/n7...

Apart from more ads, what benefit do these have over getting the same books from project Gutenberg?

It seems like they are repackaging Gutenberg books. But did not mention Gutenberg.

It's in a different jurisdiction than Gutenberg (Australia). You can't find any George Orwell books in Gutenberg, because his books are not in the public domain in the United States just yet.

Australian law says life + 50 years for authors that died before 1955. That'd make Orwell's work in the public domain since 2001 in Australia, and in the US starting from next year (died in 1950 + 70 years). For convenience copyright for those that died 70 years ago expires on January 1st next year, not exactly 70 years ago, so the author that died on January 2nd 1950 an author that died on December 31st 1950 enter the public domain at the same time: January 1st, 2021.

Project Gutenberg has a standard footer for their books that includes "Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission."

So commercial use actually requires that you strip Project Gutenberg's trademarks and redistribute only the public domain text.

i dont see any ads as long as the ublock origin is active. or am I missing it?

based on my quick glance, it looks like similar to project Gutenberg.

Mostly, no benefit over Gutenberg.

Though you could compare such sites based on: - individual title design (cover, ebook formatting/layout) - curation of titles and authors based on genre, literary period, country, and other factors

Legally, books are freely available where public domain status for a book is recognized. In the U.S., that is practically anything published before 1925. In most other countries, it's 70 years after the author or translator's death.

Gutenberg decided to block access to its main site in Germany (where I am), to resolve copyright claims.

I also use http://gen.lib.rus.ec/ to get all sorts of ebooks that I process with the Calibre app to AZW3 + fix metadata so it works with Kindle+Goodreads.

Is there a particular reason why you chose AZW3 instead of KFX? I'm no expert but it was my impression that KFX is more modern and has better options on the Kindle.

It seems to be required for goodreads integration so I can keep track of what I've read.

I've tried reading a few different editions of Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad. The first one was free (public domain) but the formatting was so terrible I couldn't get through the first page. The text was center aligned, missing periods.

Then I bought a version of it for $3 thinking the formatting must be better if I'm paying for it. It was not. I finally bought a $10 version of it and the formatting was still awful enough that I couldn't get through the first 5 pages.

For older books it feels like you have to buy a paper copy otherwise the formatting is somehow unreadable.

Unfortunately it takes time to produce high quality books. We’ve got a growing corpus of free public domain works at Standard Ebooks, including five Twain titles,[1] but regardless of a steadily growing set of volunteers it takes two weeks to eighteen months to produce a good edition of a book.

[1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/mark-twain

Like several other such collections, these books seem to be completely lacking in metadata. I looked at "The Illiad", and it doesn't even say who did the translation (it's in English), let alone when...

Surely they must know this information. Surely there is no copyright reason to not identify the translator. Why the idiocy?

I can't say I really understand the audience. You want to read a lot and you don't want to pay for something like Kindle Unlimited, but you're also unwilling to pirate your books. Is there a big user base for that? A single collection download is smaller than a video game and can contain nearly every notable work ever written in a given genre. If you download that, find an author you like, and purchase new releases from them you're contributing more than someone who only reads public domain literature.

There is a massive audience from that, when you consider the popularity of websites including Gutenberg, openculture, and others. Although the user experience from a platform like Kindle Unlimited is hard to beat, some people don't read that much and may not want a recurring subscription, while others don't like Amazon in general. Once figuring out how to buy/download and load up an ebook on a mobile device (depending on their experience) maybe they'd do it again. Or just decide a platform provider like Kindle or other publishers is way more worth it.

Only speaking for myself, there are several reasons why I don't and probably never will subscribe to a service like Kindle Unlimited.

I don't read all that much. I used to in the past, but not any longer. I don't know where you get the assumption that things like Planet eBook are specifically targeted to people who read a lot.

I have no intention at all to buy into Amazon's walled garden.

I want to own my books, not having to take the risk that books disappear from a subscribed service at any time.

I sometimes read books from Project Gutenberg, I also often buy books; but only if they have no DRM, or if I know I can strip the DRM from them. Only them I can be sure that I really have the book available for reading at any time and any device.

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