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proteal·

https://standardebooks.org/

Another great source of well formatted, public domain books.

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Still the supreme source of free public domain ebooks

https://www.gutenberg.org/

The quality of transcription on Gutenberg is rough, especially for older transcriptions. Standard eBooks are much higher quality, but selection is limited because of the effort gap.

I processed two books from Gutenberg for SE (Devil's Dictionary and a smaller scifi novel) and both were quite a bit of work to bang the books into shape (half the work was metadata enhancement, half was proofreading and correcting)

EDIT: After comparing, it's definitely just the raw Gutenburg scan w/formatting. You can see a big batch of fixed typos that weren't applied here: https://github.com/standardebooks/ambrose-bierce_the-devils-...

Perhaps, but Gutenberg is adding a huge amount of good quality content as of late, thanks to their Distributed Proofreaders community. Older content will soon be a small fraction of the total, and much of it will be picked up and updated to current standards.

The DP stuff is better, for sure. The first book I did was DP and it was far less 'buggy' than the older one. The issues were mostly formatting.

libravox.org

A great source of free (public domain) audiobooks, mostly read very well.

* https://librivox.org/

Well, it's definitely a great source of free audiobooks. (I kid.)

Listened to some of G.K. Chesterton's work through libravox, quality was great. I suggest that people check it out.

I find the https://librivox.app/ interface to be much better (same content, afaik, just a different - better - frontend).

Wikisource provides ebooks too, though the formatting can be patchy for complex formatting like tables and parallel texts.

https://en.wikisource.org

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