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Comment by nbonaparte | Hacker News Reader

Standard Ebooks (https://standardebooks.org) is what you’re looking for.

Arabian Nights has been on my list to produce for SE for a couple of years now, but its sheer size is imposing. I’ll probably do it in the not too distant future though.

Did you produce the Edgar Allan Poe Short Fiction collection? I'm reading it right now, it's great! And huge!

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/edgar-allan-poe/short-fict...

Yep! Glad you’re enjoying it. Here are my share of the SE productions: https://www.robinwhittleton.com/books/

Biggest so far (and biggest on SE at 1.2m words) has been Samuel Pepys’ Diary: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/samuel-pepys/the-diary

Thank you for your efforts!

That book is more than 2600 pages! How long did that take?

Nearly two years, but I took a bunch of time out to work on smaller pieces. The biggest problem was that Gutenberg had only transcribed about a third of the footnotes, so I spent a long time adding the remaining ones back in.

So you were transcribing a diary written in a shorthand? Or from a print version?

From scanned original sources. I just opened a random page at archive.org to give you an example:

https://archive.org/details/diaryofsamuelpep01pepy/page/228/...

Do you use OCR? Sorry for the million questions.

No problem! Yes, archive.org has OCRed all the text, but it needs a lot of finessing to bring up the quality to an acceptable standard.

Typically, Standard Ebooks will try to avoid OCR unless it’s something that’s missing from Gutenberg.

Thank you for your time!

(If you started some sort of AMA here I'm sure it would be successful.)

Great work! Is there any link between this and the Pepys Diary site at https://www.pepysdiary.com (also an awesome resource)?

I had a chat with Phil after I finished, and he sent over a list of transcription problems with Gutenberg that I’d missed which was very kind. But apart from that, no direct collaboration.

Whoa, SE looks incredible. Thanks for your work on that!

Are there any plans to support non-English ebooks as well?

Edit: Regarding non-English ebooks, I was thinking about books like "Der Vogelflug als Grundlage der Fliegekunst" (Birdflight As The Basis Of Aviation) by Otto Lilienthal (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/54565). It's a fantastic book with nice hand-drawn illustrations, and it would deserve being presented/typeset in a beautiful way. Currently available ebooks are mostly bad.

Sorry, no. Like I said in another comment, a large part of what makes SE good is our manual of style, which is really just applicable to English works. If you want to use the toolchain to produce a novel in another language feel free (removing our logo and name, of course).

This site is amazing! Thank you!

For those who loved the Andrew Lang rainbow-color fairy tale books, Lang also published a volume of The Arabian Nights, not a translation but a recounting of selected tales. I encountered the Richard Burton commodious 3-volume set as a child. It's amazing that nobody at the time thought to proctor my reading choice, given the racism, misogyny, salaciousness, naughty illustrations, everything delivered in such a matter-of-fact tone and just laid out there. To read it cover-to-cover is actually not terribly fun. There's lots of little folk tale snippets, fables, poetry, and Burton footnoted the hell out of everything.

Perhaps a collaboration?

The Internet need something like this for all languages, not only english.

This question comes up a lot. The source to our production pipeline is GPLed and freely available,[1] but the biggest part of why we produce good work is that we have a high quality manual of style.[2] Unfortunately, that second part is very specific to English, and that’s the difficult part to replicate for other languages.

[1] https://github.com/standardebooks/tools/

[2] https://standardebooks.org/manual/

I'm curious, why xhtml instead of LaTeX?

When we edit, we’re literally building a standard ePub3 file, which natively uses XHTML as its document representation. The pipeline then produces alternative versions of the same file. We could work in LaTeX, but it would reduce our contributor count (more people know XHTML than LaTeX) and we’d need to transform it anyway, with the potential of introducing new bugs.

Not that I doubt you, but what about the manual is very specific to English and wouldn't work for other languages?

From a brief look, the typography section of the manual is definitely language specific. Different written languages often have a much different typographic convention; depending on the language, different countries using it may have major or minor differences in conventions. And of course, there are different interpretations of the convention; they've included by reference a specific version of the Chicago Manual of Style. For another language, you'd need to at least need a different exhaustive manual to reference, as well as changing or reviewing the specific guidelines.

That's work that really needs to be done by a fluent, literate user of that language, hopefully with background in that language's literature and experience in copyediting, and familiarity with publishing. It's not really work you can demand of someone who did a good job (I assume) of it in English; they won't do a good job of it in another language without deep experience in that language. Developing and publishing the works in the language also needs to be done by people fluent in the language.

The example of the English version can be a guide for other languages, and there's of course room for collaboration on software between languages, but asking the English language project to expand to other languages is unlikely to get good results unless the developers also are fluent in those languages.

For Japanese, we have Aozora Bunko [1]

[1] https://www.aozora.gr.jp/

In Poland we have 5649 ebooks done so far by https://wolnelektury.pl/

We're working on a fork of Standard Ebooks focusing on Spanish.

We're actually looking for Spanish-speaking collaborators:

https://www.libro.org/

Is there an archive of the whole collection? My internet is unreliable and I usually try to get everything offline.

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