Alex Cabal: Standard Ebooks | Hacker News Reader

Alex Cabal: Standard Ebooks

mythaxis.com

59 pointsrobin_reala29 comments

Hi folks, Alex Cabal here! Looks like the site got hugged to death. Here's an archive link posted by DanBC deeper in the comments: https://web.archive.org/web/20210220133950/https://mythaxis....

Happy to answer any questions people might have. We're always looking for new contributors to produce ebooks. It's a combination of a lot of different disciplines and a lot of fun--I often say it's like building your own lightsaber.

Is your stance on non-English books something that could be changed if you had volunteers with sufficient expertise, or do you think that the requirements would be so different that a similar (forked) website would be best?

No, see my comment history for more discussion on this. The entire toolchain would have to be forked to support other typographical styles, and without a domain expert willing to dedicate years to ongoing curation and maintenance of the corpus, it's a dead-in-the-water attempt. There have been many attempts to fork SE to a different language and AFAIK I've never heard of them again.

This has been posted frequently. The most discussion is here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20594802

Based on the alternate links provided in other comments, the submitted link is an interview with Alex Cabal, and the interview does mention HN bringing a lot of traffic:

>And it got featured on Hacker News, which brought in a lot of traffic. It got all over Reddit and a bunch of blogs and news outlets. And everyone seemed to really like the project and from then on I just kind of decided to make a hobby out of it and then here we are many years later and hundreds of ebooks later and hundreds of contributors from all over the world later, it’s become a very big and I’d say successful effort that people enjoy, so I’m very proud of that.

Reminds me of a Spanish forum dedicated to making ebooks, they had standardized formats and tutorials and the ebooks where of high quality because people would help each other, each book had its dedicated thread, and try to one-up each other or procure rare books difficult to find. The site went down, because some books engaged in robbery by ship at high sea, and a bunch of copycats appeared but I never found the forums again. Such a shame because that was the most valuable part of the site.

I believe you are talking about epublibre.org! I have never seen something similar to it in any language I understand. They version control the books, have an "issues" system to alert of errata, and do their own editions. I have even seen books translated by the community.

I stopped downloading spanish books some time ago so I don't know if it still holds up.

> I have never seen something similar to it in any language I understand.

That changed today when you visited this post!

https://standardebooks.org

https://github.com/standardebooks

You're right! I meant back when I used it.

Site down, cached copy refers to:

https://standardebooks.org/

Huh, I just realized that their pagination only shows one page of books, but there are in fact many pages of books if you keep pressing the arrow button.

I guess I was thinking along the lines of the pagination I'm used to, which would usually show more than one page number button in the numbering section.

Now I've got some catching up to do...

Reminds me a lot of this project http://www.limpidsoft.com/, which is oriented around public domain works and (oddly enough) PDF output, but otherwise seems pretty similar in concept. Having encountered this a while ago, I have been wondering: does anyone else prefer PDFs?

Not for reading on a screen, but they're invaluable for making print copies, which I do in order to bind them into books. (Which has proven surprisingly easy to do!)

Lately I've been working to do my reading from paper, rather than from the same screens that bring all manner of distraction. So these days I always look for a PDF first, and I'm glad to know about the project you linked.

That’s really cool. I’ve been thinking it would be really nice to do that. How do you print? Laser? In what size? What kind of paper?

It is nice! It's a diverting hobby with a pleasantly tangible outcome, and I've also found that the impetus to "finish" the craft by reading the actual book helps me overcome a screen-driven need for distraction that's been bothering me for a while now.

So, I started answering these apparently simple questions and giving an overview of how I make books, and realized at just over 2500 words that what I really need to write here is a blog post. I need to take some pictures, too; a lot of the processes involved will be much easier to explain that way.

I actually printed off sheets for a book block earlier this morning, so that should make for a good opportunity to walk through the whole process complete with illustrations. It'll take a while to finish, especially since there's an enforced day-or-so-long pause while the binding glue dries; that said, I don't really have anything else pressing to do on this Sunday afternoon, so I suppose at the very least I should be able to produce a Part I in the next day or so. I'll link it here once it's done!

I'd be interested to learn more about this. Will you contact me when your blog post is live?

Sure!

(Might be a day or two longer than I thought; I'm midway through making a pot of chili. But I'll for sure be in touch!)

Me too, please! dminkovsky@gmail.com

Will do!

I wouldn't exactly call this an objective interview, considering the interviewer (David Grigg) is one of the most frequent contributors to the project after Alex. :)

https://github.com/drgrigg?tab=repositories

Google cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%...

The newest Wordpress update crashed the site. Back online now.

I love Standardbooks. It is such a good idea.

Link is broken

Whole site is broken, hugged to death I presume.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210220133950/https://mythaxis....

I'm getting what appears to be a WP error; looks like a botched update?

Could this be some be automated? Perhaps train using already formatted books

I think part of the value of the project is the human curation and attention to detail. The "good enough" semi-automated approach is what is already being done by Project Gutenberg and the like.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com