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Comment by lefstathiou | Hacker News Reader

Love love love Standard Ebooks.

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.

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Project lead here. There's thousands of books we want to produce out there, and limited volunteer hours. If there's something you want to work on, it might be fun to get started as a producer for the project yourself. (Note that we ask that new producers start on a simpler project first, which might rule out some longer and more complicated stuff like Plato translations--at least to start with.)

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!

I looked around on the site a bit and perused the source and I couldn't find the answer to my question: what sort of things are in the "advanced" epub version that aren't in the standard?

The “advanced” version is what we produce by default, before it’s processed for consumption by older readers. So, to give a couple of examples, CSS pseudoclasses are processed into actual classes, and MathML is rendered as PNGs. The hypothetical perfect ereader could support this natively, but for most ereaders its going to be a less buggy experience to go for the version with compatibility shims.

(Incidentally, Kobo has an excellent MathML engine, so we don’t do the aforementioned PNG rendering for kepubs.)

Interesting. I've never heard of a kepub before and I have a Kobo. The kepub format isn't even mentioned in the spec list for the [Forma].

[Forma]: https://ca.kobobooks.com/products/kobo-forma

I assume it's just an epub that's been optimized to work with Kobo's tweaks.

> There are a lot of obscure books which is great.

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.

you can search by your interests for example "philosophy" would bring ancient books on Stoicism etc.

I strongly agree with the parent post that having a simple list of books somewhere on the site is a necessity to enable browsing. If I have to search by interest, it is quite unlikely I would search here no matter how much I like the work that you do.

I'd like just a .jsonl or .csv of the list.

We publish a full OPDS feed: https://standardebooks.org/opds/all

I also wanted just a list of the collection, but it looks like the 'best' list is the list of (just HTML) repositories in their github org: https://github.com/standardebooks?q=&type=&language=html

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.

This would be a great marketing opportunity for Algolia, or Duckduckgo or Qwant site search.

+1 for the idea of some kind of donation framework

Yeah, just a "most downloaded" sort order would be great improvement.

What are GOATS?

Greatest Of All Time

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