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Comment by frereubu | Hacker News Reader

Another question - in https://standardebooks.org/contribute/producing-an-ebook-ste... you talk about "modernising" spelling, e.g. changing "some one" to "someone". This may be against the implicit goal of making these accessible for a general reader, but I prefer to read what was originally written, and it feels like it crosses a line into editorialising rather than letting the original feel stand as-is. (Although of course these texts have already been "editorialised" by their original editors!) Totally your decision given the amount of effort that has clearly gone into this, but I'd be interested to read the rationale for that decision.

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I respect this choice of modernization, and I suppose some readers enjoy it, but it makes the publisher's whole work useless to me. When a text has been altered, I can't trust it respects the intent of the author, and any style inconsistency I find may be a by-product of the publisher's mangling.

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;+}

The previous quote is from Galsworthy's "Forsyte Saga". The author used many French words and French spellings – like "Tchekov" for the Russian playwriter that was living in Paris. These subtleties are lost with the modernization.

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.

Anyone who has read books for classes in high school and above knows that even classics are routinely fucked with by publishers. Even early in the work's history. I remember even in middle school someone would invariably end up with a different publisher's edition of a book for summer reading or whatnot and we'd find changes.

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.

And of course, none of this matters in the slightest for translated works, which almost by definition includes the vast majority of works ever written.

"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.

For every book, Standard Ebooks provides a hyperlink to the original scan, a hyperlink to the original transcription, and a full revision history in which all spelling updates have been clearly marked. To me, this already seems to be going above and beyond—most ebook repositories provide less. I can’t imagine that the marginal benefit from keeping multiple parallel branches would be worth the cost in volunteer time and labor, when maintaining pristine first editions isn’t even a goal of the project.

> I also think some alterations are plain mistakes. For instance in the same book:

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

I'm disappointed to learn of this editing in Standard Ebooks, having had the misfortune to buy a Barnes & Noble copy of the complete Sherlock Holmes that had a similar approach taken. Book looks lovely, but has an altered chapter order, Americanised spellings and lots of typos. There is a certain amount of editing needed to render the likes of Shakespeare and Samuel Pepys readable, as Middle/Old English is quite a different language, but slight variants from 150ish years ago, or dialects, or the correct spelling according to the Queen's English, add flavour and should not be altered.

I respect their choice too, but like you the reason for my question was that I feel I can't trust the end product. Alex said "We only make sound-alike changes, like to-morrow -> tomorrow", which I could just about get along with, but Mahomet -> Muhammad creates an entirely different flavour for me. As Alex said, that's fine, in that it doesn't mean the other editions aren't available, but it is a shame for me when I essentially don't want to use something that has been put together so painstakingly.

That's fine! Our editions didn't erase any of the other editions you can find online and in print. You're more than welcome to select any edition that fits your reading preferences.

Apologies if that came across as at all critical. Genuinely interested in the rationale rather than it being a how-dare-you demand for you to explain yourself!

Spelling varies widely across the eras our ebooks were published in. Therefore we attempt to standardize spelling to what a modern reader might be familiar with. We only make sound-alike changes, like to-morrow -> tomorrow.

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.

And you're for sure not speaking it like he would have

Fair enough - thanks for the explanation.

A wonderful project!

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!

Is there epub-specific html markup you could add to changed words to indicate their original spelling? Like alt text for images, but in a span around a word? There's the html "title" attribute, of course, which would work (mouseover shows the title attribute's value), but that isn't semantically correct for the purpose.

No, there are too many things to track, but all of it is in the git history. Editorial changes have a commit message prefaced with [Editorial].

> For example, today you are not reading Shakespeare in the way it was spelled in its first printing.

However, we call modernised Shakespeare “abridged”.

Abridged means shortened, not modernized.

I appreciate this service you are doing, but it would be much much better to also have an original version with archaic spelling. Double bonus points for have optional (hidden by default) explanations of words. This would be tremendously helpful to some students.

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