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Comment by jpfr | Hacker News Reader

Taking asciidoc as the master format is already far ahead of the Project Gutenberg approach of not having a master format at all!

Now, in order to attract manpower, GITenberg needs to empower users who want to make their favorite book "nice".

A proper table of content, footnotes, images, formatting of tables, quotations, prose, etc. There is so much that can be done in addition to the current (often times pityful) state of the books. Imagine. With the master format, this is the last time anyone needs to do this kind of work. And anybody can read your favorite book for free. Nicely formatted and on any device.

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I'm currently working on a project that does just that. The goal is to take texts transcribed at Gutenberg and compile them carefully against strict typography and quality guidelines. Master format is epub and texts are also carefully annotated with semantic tags. It's not quite Gitenberg in that our goal probably won't be to process every Gutenberg text, and the point is to also to process each ebook against an opinionated standard. The project's work is also released to the public domain.

I've got around 40 books done and I'm 90% ready to launch the project at standardebooks.org. Drop me a line if you're interested in learning more and maybe contributing. Contact info is at the site in my profile.

If you're interested, I'd love to combine forces. Eric (the author of the newsletter) joined up with GITenberg. Github gives a LOT of surface area for additional contributors. And with our library initiative, we have the opportunity to distribute our ebooks directly to libraries. Meaning your standard ebooks can be the standard ebooks for libraries.

Absolutely. We need guides about how to use Github to asciidoc-ify books.

It looks like asciidoc has a stable future ahead too. Multiple implementations, adoption by O'Reilly and others, auto-github rendering, pandoc support (to and from formatting).

> GITenberg needs to empower users who want to make their favorite book "nice"

Absolutely. There have been a number of times when I wanted to read a book on PG that ended up with me being really unhappy with the formatting, etc. The value of the book is so much greater when it is readable without special effort.

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