Planet eBook: free literature for your device | Hacker News Reader

Planet eBook: free literature for your device

planetebook.com

64 pointssurprisetalk20 comments

Looks similar to what standard ebooks[0] has done with public domain books. Anything different compared to them?

Standard eBooks has nicer covers...

Is there some reason against using the original cover art if they're preserved somewhere? Surely the cover art doesn't have a longer copyright?

They need an oil painting that is submitted as a “link to a page scan of a book published before January 1, 1929 that reproduces the painting you selected”.

Section 10.3.3.7 of their Manual: https://standardebooks.org/manual/1.8.0/10-art-and-images

And yes, this is for US-Public Domain clearance. The cover art for an existing copy of the book has a separate copyright from the contents - creator lifetimes and what not, so they seem to be playing it safe.

And sticking to oil paintings give it a consistent aesthetic which I like.

This is just a few gutenberg.org books with a ton of ads.

Maybe I'm missing something but this seems like Project Gutenberg with less options

There's something to be said for groups like this one and Standard eBooks (mentioned elsewhere in this thread) doing some work to clean up and beautify public domain books like the ones in Project Gutenberg. Even Standard eBooks mentions that their books are all sourced from Gutenberg.

This group seems much less complete than SE, and in my opinion, they're not nearly as nice looking. I think that's more a matter of personal taste though.

The difference is UX and aesthetics. Planet eBook is a more pleasant experience if you're a casual consumer browsing around for a well-known book to read, while Gutenberg's site suits someone with more specific needs wanting to explore the long tail of public domain content.

To borrow a DevOps analogy, Gutenberg's website handles books as cattle, Planet eBook treats books a bit more like individual kittens insofar as they're hand-picked with (presumably) humans selecting the extracts and covers. The Gutenberg site has an early 2000s programmatically generated UI aesthetic that is similar to Internet Archive and the Wikipedia homepage. (At least in the case of Wikipedia, I've heard there's considerable community resistance to any significant UI changes - it's not just a budget constraint.)

A UX example. Search for "1984" on Gutenberg doesn't yield the book of that name. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=1984&submit_s.... Planet eBook site does: https://www.planetebook.com/?s=1984

To be clear, Gutenberg has been an incredible resource and gift to society. It's just that there's a need for custom front-ends to match different needs.

Ok so this is an ad-driven business leveraging public domain books. I’ll still with Project Gutenberg which is _actually_ free.

*still -> stick

On mobile the book titles take up ~15% of the available screen width, requiring much more scrolling than necessary and makes for a bit of a jarring experience reading the titles.

The amount of ads thrown randomly over this site, including ads that pop up when trying to navigate is too damn high.

This seems like a skill issue on your end. I don't see a single ad.

it is important for us (the nerds with skills) to appreciate what the internet is like for those who aren't in the know. you and I will never see an ad, our grandparents will see thousands.

People are busy. Not everyone is willing to spend their time diving into the latest ad block tricks. Some have decided that it's a better use of time to just avoid sites that use dark patterns and aggressively anti-user-friendly design to get you to click on ads instead of the actual content you came to see. This doesn't mean they lack skill — it's possible they just have different priorities.

> it's possible they just have different priorities

and/or principles

If you are going to shove this amount of ads on your users how can you say it's "free"

the about section says the books are public domain in Australia. I wonder if there’s much catalog difference between this and https://www.gutenberg.org/ (books under public domain in the U.S.)

The big one I noticed is 1984, which won't be out of copyright in the US for 20ish years.

They have used Gutenberg Austrália, I guess: https://gutenberg.net.au/

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