Hacker News Reader

Comment by acabal | Hacker News Reader

Editor-in-Chief here, happy to answer any questions!

Of interest might be my blog post on how SE runs on a small VPS using classic web tech: https://alexcabal.com/posts/standard-ebooks-and-classic-web-...

(This post is slightly out of date as there is a database now; but it's used for managing Patrons - and soon a cover art listing and approval system - not for serving the actual ebooks, which are still served as described in the post.)

Our volunteers have spent the last few months preparing a few notable books published in 1928 to be released today, Public Domain Day. Those are the top 5 books in the ebook list, starting with The Mystery of the Blue Train. Check them out!

We welcome new contributors if you'd like to work on producing a new ebook. In the next week we'll also have a brand new cover art database launched, so if you'd rather help by cataloguing new cover art for future ebooks, get in touch at our mailing list!

View on HN

Hi Alex, I shared the SE link here to help with donations and I hope it's working.

Thank you for your beautiful project.

For a few years, every January 1st, for public domain day, I have been promoting SE on social media, the thread on Mastodon is the one with the most involvement. https://fosstodon.org/@paulox/111680544393923401

It would be nice to have an SE account on Mastodon that posts about every new book published, since IMHO it's the social network more aligned with the spirit of SE.

That's great, thank you! We've had various people ask about us getting on Mastodon but frankly I really dislike social media and have only the vaguest understanding of how Mastodon works.

If we did, then someone would have to volunteer to run the account, and also the account must be able to delegate posting powers to another user without exposing the account's master password (like Tweetdeck or Facebook are able to do). If that's possible and you're interested in helping, please send me an email!

For what it's worth, they have an Atom feed - https://standardebooks.org/feeds/atom/new-releases

I have a suggestion: You could optimize the website to be easily readable and navigable on the Kindle's web browser, and recommend it as an option. I've often found it to be the easiest way to get non-store books on my Kindle. I've also noticed that cover images are handled correctly when the ebook is downloaded straight onto the device, with no need for a separate image file.

A hurdle for this though, is that building a good website for the Kindle browser is a pain, as the browser's support for various html/css/js features and standards is all over the place, with no debugging tools available.

I believe our website does have some basic Kindle browser support. The problem, as you noted, is that Kindle's browser is terrible.

I say the same thing in every ebook thread: On a purely technical level Kindle is a terrible ereader designed by people who seem to hate books. Buy almost anything else.

Recommendations?

I imagine the Kobo is high on that list.

Kobo, with either stock OS or KOReader (I use this, in part because the font size can be easily increased for my daughter who so far needs text larger than stock) or Plato.

Is the build quality and backlighting as good as the Kindle? And do they have a seamless option (no notched screen)?

I no longer have a Kindle to compare, but I'm very happy with build and lighting on my Kobo Libra 2. I've used Kindles since the Kindle 1, and there are some Kobo things that I don't like as well as Kindle, but it's a better-than-decent e-reader and I'm glad to be out from under Amazon's thumb.

I've been happy with the half dozen Kobos in my house.

Weirdly, about half of them have developed a problem after about 5-7 years, whereby they intermittently stop charging. Replacing the battery doesn't seem to fix it. Might be a problem with the soldering of the USB connector to the PCB?

As a bonus they are Linux based, and you can do fun things like replace internal SD cards with bigger ones, login using telnet and install new applications.

Onyx Boox. They run full Android, which means sync with Play Books, Kindle, Libby, etc.

A jailbroken kindle is okay - they make an adequate PDF reader and they can be found easily for less than the alternatives, at least in Britain. I do agree they're somewhat poor when used as intended.

They're also quite a nice embedded ARM Linux machine for a lot less than I could make one or buy one from elsewhere, but I suspect that isn't the core market for a kindle...

What’s the problem with the kindle? I use an old paperwhite and I have no issues reading epubs in it that I send by email

Thank you so much for the work you and the whole team, and the contributing community, do! I've read a bunch of classics thanks to your editions, and have donated in the past. This post is a reminder for me to do so again!

Came to say the same. I have a recurring donation set up and I'm always happy to see updates and mentions of the project.

I've been eagerly awaiting the new Lord Peter Wimsey novel! To avoid burnout, I've been reading them as they enter the public domain instead of reading the whole series all at once, and I was hoping that it would be in the first batch this year. Thank you so much for your hard work!

heh, that reminds me of when I used to eagerly hunt used bookstores for anything by henry cecil (an out-of-print humorous writer). it was always exciting to find one I hadn't read before. and then his entire works got reprinted and you would have thought I would just buy and binge read the lot, but somehow the excitement went out of it and I just ended up reading a couple more. I should go back and catch up on him, actually, it's been years and years since I last read one.

The page <title> for collections could stand to lose the "Browse free ebooks in the" preamble. It makes it harder to distinguish when looking at a list of open tabs. Consider:

- "Browse free ebooks in the Encyclopædia Britannica’s Gateway to the Great Books set[…]"[1]

- "Browse free ebooks in the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels set[…]"[2]

- "Browse free ebooks in the Modern Library’s 100 Best Nonfiction set[…]"[3]

(Indeed, the titles are even much longer than that. It feels SEO-ish; not sure why that would be a priority for a free culture project like Standard Ebooks, especially give the momentum and cachet it already has.)

Collections should also have placeholders for unavailable titles. For example, currently the "Utopian Trilogy" collection[4] contains exactly one item, in spite of the true size of the set it actually belongs to. When an item is not available because of copyright, that (along with the year in which SE will first be allowed to make its own edition available) should be made clear. Where it's unavailable because no one has yet proofed the text for an SE edition, a clear call to action can be made.

And it's seemingly minor, but on the subject of editions, I wish SE followed closer to the print tradition instead of the modern Web millieu and clearly identified its microeditions as exactly that: distinct editions of the same text. (Yes, that means there are possibly dozens (or hundreds?) of different editions, given that errors can be found after the fact and the SE house style may even change, necessitating updates. No, that's not a problem.)

1. <https://standardebooks.org/collections/encyclopaedia-britann...>

2. <https://standardebooks.org/collections/modern-librarys-100-b...>

3. <https://standardebooks.org/collections/modern-librarys-100-b...>

4. <https://standardebooks.org/collections/utopian-trilogy>

>The page <title> for collections could stand to lose the "Browse free ebooks in the" preamble.

That looks like it might be search engine optimization.

It seems like maybe it's for SEO.

I see that you use public domain images for books - do artists also contribute work from scratch (with an appropriate release)?

Nobody has offered as of yet, and if someone did I think the quality would have to be extremely high for me to consider it.

Do you happen to have a wishlist of artwork or a particular project that would benefit from custom artwork? I would like to contribute art to the project, whether it ends up used or not. I used to work as a digital artist professionally.

Sci-fi works are the hardest to find cover art for as naturally there is zero public domain sci-fi themed fine art. If you can paint in a fine art style, contact me via email and let's chat.

This is such a cool project. Every time it hits the front page I browse the selections like I’m at a book store.

Have you considered making books sortable by popularity? It might be more approachable for new users if they see books they recognize at the top.

That's a frequent request but it would also require having our catalog in a database, which we don't have right now. I do think the time is soon for doing that for several reasons, but there's no spare time in my day at the moment.

Perhaps there’s no need for a db? If you have basic web logs, some volunteer can find out how many times a book was downloaded etc, and use that to do a one-off “best of 2023” etc? A kind of SE Wrapped thingy?

Do you have any thoughts on providing manually pre-formatted PDF files? Em-dashes, curly quotes, etc. are all nice, it's a step in the right direction, but in the end the EPUB file needs to be interpreted by the ebook reader on the fly and in terms of typesetting quality the outcome is far from what physical books provide, since you still get orphans, weird hyphenations, ugly/misaligned chapter titles. For me, nothing beats reading a print-ready PDF file.

That's a common request but there are no plans to officially offer PDFs. We offer a variety of reflowable file formats, and each format is more burden to maintain; since PDF is a famously difficult format, maintaining it would be even more burden. A reader requiring a PDF can use a tool to convert any of our files to PDF. That's basically what we'd do at the end of the day, anyway.

There's been some mailing list chatter lately on how to best format PDF editions, but that's not being pursued on a project level.

Hi and thanks for the great work! Have you considered offering .mobi or .azw file formats of the books? With the 2023 browser update, even old Kindles now have a fast and functional web browser. It is almost possible to find and download Standard Ebooks directly from the Kindle browser, but for the file format.

We do offer azw3 files for all of our books. https://standardebooks.org/help/how-to-use-our-ebooks#kindle...

Yes, Amazon has changed the game and they only allow downloads in .AZW, .PRC, .MOBI or .TXT format now.

I understand that this is their fault and not yours, but maybe it could be interesting for you to offer one of these formats now that the Kindle browser is actually usable?

> they only allow downloads in .AZW

Do they actually check the file content or just the name?

If the latter, just a .AZW alias to the actual .AZW3 might work ...

(I can't test, don't have a Kindle nowadays)

I don't know. The Kindle browser doesn't have any copy and paste function, so it's difficult to work around any limitation.

I meant the SE site serving ".azw" files that are the same as the .azw3 - I understood that it's the Kindle browser that limits the downloads, right?

Once the files are in the Kindle, it would probably work out OK.

Ah, I see. Great idea! I hope they see your comment.

You could probably drop the server and use Cloudflare Pages and a SSG. I use Astro for https://sabine.press/

Edit: oh and Lambda for a total of 2 server functions

Well, the point is not to jump at the new-fangled tech and AWS cloud lock-in :)

I’m curious, why do you have a policy against hosting religious books?

I'd imagine that if they host one religions books, many more religions will come out of the wood work and demand their books also be included, leading the site to be largely religious texts.

Numerous sites, platforms, stores, etc. host religious books, and that has never happened.

The site actually hosts several "religious books" (try filtering by the "Spirituality" tag -- I've even produced several books on religious topics myself for SE). What it doesn't host are "Religious texts from modern world religions" (what some might call "scriptures," e.g. the Bible or the Quran) which is a much narrower category than "religious books."

As a religious person myself, I actually think this policy is very sensible. Most (nearly all?) religious texts of major world religions were originally written in languages other than English, and so if SE were to try to host those texts the site would have to make an editorial call about which translations of those texts are the "best." That quickly enters very murky theological territory, where one side of a given religion might push for one particular translation, whereas another side would push for another translation.

To give the Bible as an example, Catholics and Orthodox Christians include the deuterocanonical books (e.g. Tobit, Judith, Sirach) in their canons whereas Protestants exclude these. Would the SE version of the Bible include these? Some American fundamentalist Christians claim that the King James Version is the only valid English translation of the Bible, whereas the Revised Version (also available in the public domain) is based on more reliable Greek manuscripts. But some conservative Christians reject the Revised Version and its descendants based on certain theological premises...

Do you catch my drift? IMHO it's very sensible for SE to avoid these sorts of debates entirely by sticking to books where you could argue (with some degree of handwaving) that there really is a "best version" :)

I think that makes sense, but it still seems a bit arbitrary, I don’t see bookshops having these issues

Yes, bookshops will sell one version of the Bible to Catholics, another to Protestants, another to fundamentalists, another to progressives, etc. :)

In contrast, part of the SE editorial philosophy is that it tries to host the best (based on academic scholarship, translation quality, academic acclaim, etc.) version of each text available in the public domain, which excludes that "something for everyone" sort of play available to a commercial bookstore. You could rightly argue that this is losing something (it's good to have multiple translations to compare if you're reading a text for critical purposes), but the SE editorial philosophy avoids a certain amount of confusion and clutter for the general reader. So there's a deliberate (you could call it "arbitrary" in some sense, if you wish) tradeoff being made here.

US Barnes & Noble can have a few meters of shelves with different versions of the Bible, and a buying guide. It is quite striking if you are not used to it.

Part of the issue would be that the nooks are translations and the copywriter data would be from the translation date.

So modern versions of e.g. the Bible could not be in Standard Ebooks. So easiest to not carry any translations.

Bookshops have no problem with this as part of the purchase price will go to the copyright owners of the translation.

Modern versions of e.g. Tolstoy's "War and Peace" could not be in Standard Ebooks. So easiest to not carry any translations?

One of the funny things about Bible translations is that more modern translations are based on older manuscripts than older translations, due to advances in archeology. SE can't carry any translations that incorporate the insights of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and having access to some of the oldest Hebrew manuscripts is a pretty big deal when it comes to translating the Tanakh.

It's true, modern versions of War and Peace can't be hosted at SE, but those modern versions generally don't reflect revolutionary leaps in archeology :)

> So modern versions of e.g. the Bible could not be in Standard Ebooks.

There are modern translations that are permissively licensed and are of surprisingly high quality. See the NET Bible as a prime example. It's also the only one I know of with good translation notes that can be had for free.

> Most (nearly all?) religious texts of major world religions were originally written in languages other than English, and so if SE were to try to host those texts the site would have to make an editorial call about which translations of those texts are the "best."

The site already hosts a number of works that were originally written in languages other than English, and yet it had no problems making an editorial call about which translations of those texts are the "best." The obvious solution would be to just allowing multiple translations of foreign-language books.

Is there a technical reason to disallow multiple translations of the same text? I can see on the "wanted ebooks" page a number of translated titles[0]; so the project does seem to make editorial decisions about which translations to work on. Obviously, where one translation exists, there may be others that have other advantages.

[0] - https://standardebooks.org/contribute/wanted-ebooks

We try to pick the “best” translation that’s in the public domain in the US. Quite often, that’s a single translation unfortunately, but if there are multiple we do try to evaluate them from a readers point of view.

It seems like most of the Christian books on SE are Roman Catholic in orientation (Belloc, Chesterton, etc.) Pilgrim's Progress is a Protestant work, but it would be good to see a better representation of both pre-Reformation and Protestant titles.

Can you provide any specific recommendations?

Sure, how about some classics like:

The Didache

Anselm, Cur Deus Homo

Anselm, Proslogion

Augustine, City of God

Augustine, Confessions

Augustine, On Christian Doctrine

William Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life

Luther, The Bondage of the Will

Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion

Pascal, Pensées

All of these are in public domain.

My thought was that many/most religious works are public domain and are already readily available elsewhere.

Actually all of what SE has now has content on different sites

Amazing that you don't use front-end javascript at all. Is there anything you wish HTML+CSS could do better?

Re XHTML - It looks like the website is being served with a text/html content type. Did you give up on your XHTML experiment? How did it go? Maybe it would help if browsers reported back errors to the server, like how "Content Security Policy" reporting works.

We never served as application/xhtml+xml. That has some nasty side effects in browsers, like no incremental rendering. But it’s always been legit to serve XHTML as text/html even if you lose the break-on-error functionality.

In addition to the Newsletter and Feeds, it would be nice to have a Blog or News section where you can publish news every now and then, for example an article for the public domain day would have been very useful for making new publications known, simplifying sharing and attracting new volunteers or donors.

Thank you for Standard Books!

I remember when Manybooks used to be what you want. But quality dropped precipitously with self-published new novels, I suspect some money is changing hands somewhere.

What happened to Manybooks? Does Standard Books have a plan for avoiding that?

I don't know anything about Manybooks' history, sorry.

At SE we focus exclusively on US public domain titles; that's one of the major philosophical points of the project. The other major point is a high quality standard, so it's in our best interest to keep pursuing that. SE became known due to its quality standard, not because it's more free ebooks. Therefore if we strayed from those points then we'd be just another free ebook site, of which there are no shortage.

Quality is also why we reject self-published books that have been dedicated to the public domain, as those are typically low-quality content to begin with. (Though I wouldn't call every single book we host "high quality content" in the sense that each one is up there with Shakespeare. But books that have survived a hundred years tend to have survived because they're not slush.)

Good to know that as a self-published author myself that the quality of any site is going to drop as soon as I put my book on there.

Every other book I read now is by an author with NO rating, I have read six this year, none were memorable, or my cup of tea I will give you that, but two of the four- or five-star offerings on Amazon were just as bad. As they say, if you don't open an oyster, you will never find a pearl.

If you want to go to the work of creating a curated selection of high-quality, contemporary, self-published, public domain books no one is stopping you.

That's not the niche SE has chosen to target. You can't expect them to serve every possible use case.

What are the dimensions produced by se build-images?

The expected size for the JPG for the cover is 1400x2100.

It says on each book page "Compatible epub — All devices and apps except Kindles and Kobos." - but i think this is incorrect bc epub is now the preferred format for Kindle.

Kindle does not natively support epubs: https://standardebooks.org/help/how-to-use-our-ebooks#kindle...

I email epubs to my kindle frequently and they open and read just like any ebook. I last tried this a week ago and it was fine.

When you use 'Send to Kindle' to send an epub to your device, you are not reading an epub. In the link above, it mentions how Kindle converts epub to an Amazon format before allowing your device to read it. Amazon's formats on the whole are inferior, with poor rendering capabilities, and an automatic conversion means all bets are off in terms of what the ebook will look like.

Kindle will not natively support epub until you can connect it to a USB cable, transfer an epub using a file manager, and it does not get secretly converted.

I did not know that and does kind of explain one book with pictures that looked a bit weird. On the whole though, text epubs are totally readable as I get most of my books from non-amazon sites such as smashwords and email them to the kindle to read.

Kobos also support epub.

Almost all my Kobo books are EPUB and work great.

Real EPUBs can crash Kobos and you need to specifically reformat them with a plug-in in Calbre. It may be a recent update that broke it, since I used to have less problems.

Inevitably, like everyone who rejects PHP frameworks because "PHP is already a templating language", you just wound up reinventing the framework anyway.

I'm not complaining - It's just, there's a reason everyone goes for the existing frameworks and it isn't addiction to complexity. Raw PHP code is legendarily insecure and prone to XSS and other issues if you don't do things exactly right.

Nice site, though.

> prone to XSS and other issues if you don't do things exactly right.

Not any more so than sites with frameworks. I’ve found XSS issues in Java Spring framework built sites that didn’t “do things exactly right”. A framework doesn’t magically fix that.

No one mentioned magic. Frameworks are designed to do what PHP developers wind up implementing in an ad-hoc, haphazard way themselves, and tend to be better at doing it on average. Any code can have security issues but I'd trust a battle-hardened open source PHP framework over some random coder's hubris any day of the week.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com