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standardebooks.org
standardebooks.org
If by some chance a maintainer reads this thread a couple requests:
1) There are a lot of obscure books which is great. Also doesn’t hurt to add some of the GOATS such as the works of Plato or perhaps even the Harvard Classics
2) Sorting on site is frustrating
3) I would be willing to commission high quality epubs and I’m sure others would too for my own benefit and humanity. For example I can get copies of the works for Plato on Gutenberg but it merits a Standard Ebooks edition and I wouldn’t blink at donating $250 or some number toward that cause. Knowing kids across the globe would have access to high quality digital editions is worth it to me. Worth exploring setting up a program for this.
Our wanted ebook list includes a list of works that we think are good starts for first-time producers: https://standardebooks.org/contribute/wanted-ebooks
I've been exploring the idea of crowdsourcing financing for ebook production. But I think we need some kind of not-for-profit framework set up first. If anyone is in that space and would like to talk about NFP infrastructure, or being a NFP fiscal sponsor, please contact me!
(Incidentally, Kobo has an excellent MathML engine, so we don’t do the aforementioned PNG rendering for kepubs.)
This is my biggest issue: discoverability.
The site has an index which shows 12 books at a time, and it looks like 36 pages. So roughly 430 books.
This is not actually a gigantic number of books, one that is small enough that it would be great to look through all the books, and yet I'm never going to do that if I have to page through 12 results at a time.
It would be great to get a simple list view of the collection.
It would be great to just index whatever metadata is available and provide search facets on those fields. It looks like there's quite a lot of metadata in just the few that I cherry-picked: https://github.com/standardebooks/p-g-wodehouse_right-ho-jee...
Looks like at least some of that already works, since you can sort by the "se:reading-ease.flesch" field on the web site.
Sorry for bringing it up, but is that a typo in the description?
We're always looking for producers to volunteer to work on new ebooks. The process is a blend of many different disciplines, so if you're interested in art, literature, programming, and the command line, trying your hand at an SE production might be fun!
What are the plans for other languages, if any?
I noticed that you have e.g. German or French originals translated to English. Is there place in the project for the original languages?
And what about translations to other languages? If I'm going to read a translation of Les trois mousquetaires, I'd prefer a translation to my native language instead of English.
Edit: saw the thread about this down below too late; was on mobile. Never mind my questions, they seem to be answered.
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks?query=e
displays every book with an e in the title or author's name on one page. I guess that doesn't leave out many.
curl https://standardebooks.org/opds/all | awk '/<title>/ {split($0,a,">");split(a[2],b,"<");printf b[1]} /<name>/{split($0,a,">");split(a[2],b,"<");print " - "b[1]}' | tail -r
Hadji Murád - Leo Tolstoy
Pierre and Jean - Guy de Maupassant
The Red House Mystery - A. A. Milne
The Moon Pool - A. Merritt
Fables - Aesop
Poirot Investigates - Agatha Christie
The Man in the Brown Suit - Agatha Christie ...I tweaked your output to put author first, to make sorting work better:
curl -s https://standardebooks.org/opds/all | awk '/<title>/ {split($0,a,">");split(a[2],b,"<")} /<name>/{split($0,c,">");split(c[2],d,"<");print d[1]" - "b[1]}' | sort
A. A. Milne - The Red House Mystery
A. Merritt - The Moon Pool
Aesop - Fables
Agatha Christie - Poirot Investigates
Agatha Christie - The Man in the Brown Suit
Agatha Christie - The Murder on the Links
Agatha Christie - The Mysterious Affair at Styles
Agatha Christie - The Secret Adversary
Aldous Huxley - Antic Hay
...I guess I shouldn't complain too much, even the New York Times misuses the double hyphen.
Features:
- works in all platforms with pdf format
- faster navigation
- faster search
Took me a few moments to realize that this is because my Firefox is set to download PDFs instead of displaying them in Firefox.
Just one thing: the two-level horizontal scroll doesn't work consistently for me, and just seems a bit weird. I feel like the top level navigation should be left to the obvious top links. I don't really see the point of visualising all the sections as a continuous whole, whereas the individual lists make sense to be scrollable.
I did experiment with list based home screen, but I thought the information density is low for mobile screens. However for tags and authors it’s list based as you suggested.
That being said, I’m planning an update in near future to include public domain audio Books where I can reform Home screen section behavior better for new users.
If maintainers are seeing this: any plans to publish non-English books? Is there room to collaborate on adding support for it?
One fact of reality is that Standard Ebooks' tooling is English-based. Everything from the pages/xhtml it generates to its typography tools to its style guide expects English. For example, Spanish uses — and «» instead of English's “” and ‘’ for dialogue so you can imagine how SE's punctuation tooling heuristics are going to differ here.
You'd also have to come up with a new set of standards for another language. What sort of correction is a fair modernization and which would be unfair editorialization? SE itself already makes controversial decisions here for English like "to-day" -> "today".
It would be a large undertaking to parameterize some sort of LANG=EN setting and imo not worth it. I think the only route for that sort of thing to happen is if 2+ "forks" get to Standard Ebooks' quality and then decide to work together years down the road.
Also, legal clarity is sometimes an issue in other countries where an English translation written in the USA of that same work is clearly in the public domain. There are works where the original non-English content, despite being long translated into English, are still owned by the estate, but the English translation is liberated.
Something I realized was just how many books exist only as scans. Transcription isn't very fun, but this makes it rewarding. For example, I have some early Spanish sci-fi books I've transcribed into epubs that you cannot find outside of dirty scans.
https://standardebooks.org/contribute/accepted-ebooks
> Types of ebooks we don’t accept
> Non-English-language books. Translations to English are, of course, OK.
1. Discover / browse / search.
2. Expect high quality text & typography.
3. Be part of a high-volume community that archives and refines texts year after year.
"Then build your own similar site with high-quality titles in French!" , I hear some say. Sure, but I see tons of excellent marketing & infrastructure already done by Standard Ebooks, which could be reused for non-English books!
Said differently, mid/long term I see the greater good being achieved by supporting non-English titles in Standard Ebooks itself, not in one satellite mimic site per language, of varying maintenance quality. To compare with the domain of online encyclopedias, these are the same reasons to have en.wikipedia.org and fr.wikipedia.org maintained under one (Wikipedia) umbrella sharing infrastructure, not wikipedia.org and frenchwikipedia.org maintained by entirely different teams.
[1] https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/standardebooks/c/JdVpCm3ckGg...
[2] https://groups.google.com/g/standardebooks/c/osOEfs5HdLo/m/2...
Agreed, it's worth bringing up again on the mailing list; will do this week and post here a link to my message.
This isn't the fault of Standard Ebooks, but it's an elephant in the room of public domain texts in general. In many ways I'd rather see effort put into crowdsourced or volunteer modern translation than into improved copyediting.
It's especially problematic if you consider that the original text in the foreign language isn't available as well, as you're noting.
Mistakes can/will be done, and fixed afterwards. It's the beauty of our online worlds.
All of the work in polishing an epub is the chore of transcription and then nitty gritty details like correctly tagging things like roman numerals and embedded poems and following some sort of standardization guide.
The thing that Standard Ebooks does, aside from being decisive over its standards, is then require the epub to go through a review process by its creator who is a domain expert in the craft. This expert bottleneck is a big reason why SE book quality is so reliable. Accepting other languages drastically changes and perhaps even relaxes this bottleneck and changes the whole organization.
In another comment, I think you suggest that it might be time to try to persuade him to accept non-English books:
> Agreed, it's worth bringing up again on the mailing list; will do this week and post here a link to my message.
But it's not really up to persuasion. Because it takes more than an idea to expand the accepted languages. It requires at least one reliable expert in that language who can stand up a completely new set of tools and standards and then steward that project to fruition. And that's such a big undertaking that it's really a whole new project, not just yet another egg under SE's wings, but a whole new chicken coop.
Suggesting that Standard Ebooks move to support other languages is 0.0000001% of the work towards that goal. People do that all the time, then claim "okay, I'll fork the project", and then fizzle out.
Another example is that whole swathes of code in https://github.com/standardebooks/tools, SE's core workflow, become useless once you're targeting something other than English. By browsing their style guide and that repo, you'll realize that SE's value really is its focus on English. It's more of a suite of English tools than it is a epub editing kit, as the latter is the easy part.
I've been monkeying around open source long enough to know veeeery well that "Suggesting [...] is 0.0000001% of the work towards that goal" , and I've been culprit of that myself :) .
Still, I like SE a lot and might be interested in doing the work. So, I'll make my point to the ML (expanding on A. points I brought here, and B. contradictions that you and other commenters wrote, thanks), asking if folks are convinced by the vision, and asking for technical advice to build the incremental path. Then if there's agreement, maybe I, or someone else, will commit to it.
It's also the only avenue that makes sense. As I said in a sibling comment, I've been working on a Spanish-language version of SE and I have some good ideas of how the tool chain could be parameterized for multi-language support, but it also feels like a pointless cherry on top (and a complication of an already non-trivial workflow) to bring everything under one umbrella. And it would require a loss of control for SE's creator.
I recommend epub'ing a few book scans yourself in your preferred language and starting a project around that. You'll find other people who have at least started a fork themselves that you might be able to round up under one org. I personally have aimed for 10 ~finished books and a domain name that hosts my own style guide + tutorial to prove that I'm serious about it (to myself) before I publish my efforts. And you need as much to appeal to any would-be contributors.
I think the only plausible place to be in 5 years is for a couple major sister projects to reach maturation and then form a sort of ring of "Check out lettres-libérées.org for a similar project for French works."
Thinking about it! Thanks for the advice.
In the past people have expressed interest in forking the toolset for other languages, which is totally fine. But I don't think I've seen any of those attempts come to fruition yet.
In another comment of this sub-thread ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25140605 ) I wrote:
> "Still, I like SE a lot and might be interested in doing the work. So, I'll make my point to the ML (expanding on A. points I brought here, and B. contradictions that commenters brought), asking if folks are convinced by the vision, and asking for technical advice to build the incremental path. Then if there's agreement, maybe I, or someone else, will commit to it."
Do you think it remains worthwhile that I bring the discussion, or is it 100% nailed among current maintainers that the "incremental path" I'm hoping for doesn't exist and "just fork / do your own thing for your language and register your domain" is already the consensus?
(which are sourced from Gutenberg catalog, but with dynamic navigation and search)
Yup: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=standardebooks.org
Huh, that is weird that the dupe detector didn't pick that up. I was going through some old bookmarks and submitted dark.fail and it hit the dupe detector as a duplicate submission from October 2019 from user rakefire.
A few other links to different sites I tried submitting also hit the dupe detector too. Normally I do a hn.algolia.com search on the headline keywords (sorted by date) for anything current before submitting a link but after the third or fourth 'dupe' I dug out the Standard Ebooks link, gritted my teeth and mentally dared the dupe detector to find someone else on HN that had come across the site before. Turns out many had (lol).
Your comment made me chuckle (and also scratch my head a little about the dupe-detector algorithm) so thanks for pointing it out (and have a +1 from me as thanks).
It seems like a waste to read a carefully crafted ebook using Calibre, which is pretty bad from a graphical/aesthetic perspective. Foliate is better, but not great either.
I'm thinking of running a Windows VM just to run Adobe Digital Editions and read epubs comfortably. Is there a better option?
Bookworm, perhaps?
https://www.flathub.org/apps/details/com.github.babluboy.boo...
This is very cool and I hope it stays around.
edit: Aside from the books, the site is quite nice too.
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/hermann-hesse/siddhartha/g...
Edit: I thought you meant "recommend to add" vs. "these are available and I recommend them", my mistake.
It'd be great if one could view a compact list of all titles available. Viewing 20 at a time is frustrating.
I have been converting the EPUBs to PDFs (through online converters like Zamzar) and they look great in both formats.
These look beautiful. Great work.
Perhaps the quality is lower, but I've certainly never noticed, compared with the books I've bought directly from Kobo.
Is there a way to download every book you have? I have an eReader that I'd love to stuff full of these kinds of books.
If you mean submitting an ePub you’ve already worked on, then it would need to be redone to use our framework. By having a “Standard” imprint we can continuously upgrade and work on the whole corpus.
I would like it to be added to the list of books you have.
The book is titled "Nonovvio", and it's in Italian language. [0]
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Nonovvio-Italian-Simone-Brunozzi-eboo...