This is a common practice that editors and publishers have quietly engaged in for centuries. For example, today you are not reading Shakespeare in the way it was spelled in its first printing.
After reading this comment I couldn't help but picture medieval monks, toiling away copying old manuscripts into "modern" English. Normally a thankless task, so thank you!
However, we call modernised Shakespeare “abridged”.
So, when I care about a book, I never read Standard Ebooks' edition.
By the way, the modernization is more than joining a few words. Sometimes, Standard Ebooks replaces the word used at the time the book was written. For instance:
This time, however, the mountain was going to [-Mahomet;-]{+Muhammad;+}
I also think some alterations are plain mistakes. For instance in the same book:
if she wanted a good book she should read [-“Job”-]{+Job+};
his father was rather like Job while Job still had land.Unless the book is specifically declared to be the original text - and it may have to specify which original text - they're going to be edited.
However, in electronic form it should be possible to include both in one file, or two files with the original in a repo branch once all the document structure stuff has been added. That text will never change, so merging formatting-only changes should be pretty painless.
"As it was written" is a very high bar that is simply not attainable for anything other than fairly recent works in your native language.
That one appears to not be a mistake, [0] suggests that not quoting the name of the book of the bible being referred to (so [Job] rather than ["Job"]) is the style accepted by Chicago, MLA, and APA.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_citation#Common_formats
It makes it hard to browse those collections to find actual books to read. The first 3 series I clicked on all said "not P.D." (which at first I didn't know what "P.D" meant - remember your audience does not have your level of familiarity with your context, perhaps a tooltip on that badge would help)..
Then I see "this book will enter public domain in 2050"..
I commend you for this project, it's really awesome work.. From a user's experience, it would be great to have a filter on your various lists that restricts only to books that are available, and excludes these books that are not yet in your collection.
(More concretely my reader is a 2nd-gen kindle which is basically useless these days and I’d love an idea of something that can display standard ebooks with all their advanced formatting)
Thanks!
Standard eBooks offers kepub format for Kobo devices and files, they use their advanced Webkit-based renderer: https://standardebooks.org/help/how-to-use-our-ebooks#kobo-f...
Thanks for the recommendation!
I think Kindle's renderer hasn't changed significantly for many years, and it had always been pretty bad. I always say that Kindle seems to have been created by people who hate books.
The best renderer around is iBooks on an iPad, which as far as I can tell uses an up-to-date Webkit.
I've been meaning to try calibre-web, but I'm doubtful iBooks will support OPDS.
If I want to appreciate a nice Kepub from Standard Ebooks, I upload it directly to the Kobo.
What I'm personally looking for:
- Linux and/or OS X
- No ‘import’ requirement (a viewer, not a collection manager)
- Single page or continuous (no forced double spread)
- No required animations
- At least basic control over font size, spacing, margins.
- Keyboard navigation (at least next/previous page)
For reference my gen 2 kindle is 16 years old.
Unmatched UI tweaking features which make reading a pleasure. Syncs bookmarks with cloud services, thus across different devices.
In my ideal world all devices would be like this.
It does a good job of modernising old Kindles.
All the author pages come before any pages with books from those authors.
Links in the first column.
Personally I think it's important to have one person in charge who is able to approve of the quality of all the project's output; for now, at SE, that person is me and I'm only an expert in English.
Anywhere between 1 week for the simplest (straight narrative, not too much verse or endnotes) and ~1 year (thousands of endnotes, pages of verse, drama, in-line references to book titles, use of technical terms, etc)
Beginners, and people working on more advanced books, can take much, much, much longer.