acabal

Some of this information is included in each ebook's colophon, at the end of the book.

There is no counter online, but you can trust me (the S.E. Editor-in-Chief) when I say I used Bash to count them :)

It works just fine for fiction. Ulysses is a very special edge case in the pantheon of all literature, so it's no surprise it doesn't work well for this one case.

Our volunteers pick what books they personally want to work on. Those books have to meet our collections policy criteria: https://standardebooks.org/contribute/collections-policy

Yes, it's a bit silly! The reason the score is so off is because we use the Flesch Reading Ease algorithm[1] to calculate it, which was designed for the US Navy to be able to score technical manuals. It works very well for most prose too... except highly modernist prose!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch-Kincaid_Reading_Ease

Of course! Stripe, Paypal, Postmark/Sendgrid/whatever are not part of the majority I'm talking about. (Although Fractured Atlas, which is merely a wrapper for the Stripe API, is; we use it because it solves a people problem, not a technical one.) There are certainly projects and businesses that will require many high-power servers and more complex technical machinery than basic LAMP. However most people on HN are not developing the next Stripe, even if they don't realize it yet.

Sure, at some point you're going to be relying on some 3rd party somewhere. We use a VPS and not a bare-metal hand-installed rack, and we rely on an electrical company and not a hand-turned crank to power our servers. As far as email goes, It's simply not possible to self-host transactional email in 2024 if you want it to arrive in an inbox and not a permanent spam blackhole; this is a people problem and not a technical one. Likewise, another people problem is that it's not possible to accept money online without involving a 3rd party service like Fractured Atlas or Stripe or PayPal.

(Moving away from GitHub towards a self-hosted Git solution, and away from Google Groups to a self-hosted mailing list, is actually on our long-term todo list[1]).

All those things don't mean one can't run one's web app on a single tiny server, like we do. I still argue that outsourcing the basic fundamentals of one's web app, like the OS, runtime, or database to some cloud service, or resorting to flavor-of-the-month frameworks or containers, or doing silly things like using Javascript to render one's entire frontend, often simply result in complexity, slowness, and bloat.

[1] https://github.com/standardebooks/web/blob/master/README.md#...

Of course. The entire point is that so much of that is just unnecessary for 90% of web projects. Most projects that are basically a front-end website backed by a local DB can get by on a 2GB VPS if they embrace classic web tech and don't get sucked in to whatever framework/cloud service/container craziness is hot this week. Once they start hitting millions of page views a month, we can talk about upgrading to 4GB :)

At Standard Ebooks we serve a respectable number of page views and ebooks each month - and have been on the front page of HN three or four times - all of it done with a single 4GB VPS. And the only reason we upgraded to 4GB from 2GB is because we needed more RAM for the server to build the extremely large Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ebook - if it weren't for that, our 2GB server would still have been just fine for all that traffic.

I wrote a blog post about how we do it here: https://alexcabal.com/posts/standard-ebooks-and-classic-web-...

Author here! This post is slightly out of date, as the server now does have a database to handle patron registration, and we've upgraded to 4GB because we needed more RAM to build the extremely long endnotes in Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. But the server still indexes and serves ebooks in the same way!

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.

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

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!

It's very uncommon, if you want to do that then just email me privately and we can set something up.

You don't have to use Github if you don't want to, but you do have to use Git. We've had more than a few producers successfuly produce ebooks without using GitHub or Google Groups.

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.

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

Folio Society basically already does this, at a premium price. Used copies of well-set PD classics from respected publishers like Franklin Library or Modern Library go for pennies and can be shipped to your door fron places like Abebooks, or you can easily find them at your nearby library sale/used bookstore/charity shop/etc.

I've been toying with the idea for a while but I think the market is just too saturated, even for premium editions. Maybe the focus should be on reviving more obscure works... not sure.

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.

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.

Librivox creates audiobooks of PD texts. I've heard good things about their work but I personally don't listen to any audiobooks in general.

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

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.

Like PG, our editions are blends of other editions, along with our own updates. Often our edition winds up looking nothing like the PG edition, for example when we combine volumes, extract footnotes into endnotes, remove pagination, and so on.

So submitting back to PG would be more like replacing a PG edition, instead of updating it; and I doubt the original PG submitter would like it if their hard work was simply replaced by someone else who thought their version was an improvement.

Our volunteers do sometimes submit typos they find back to PG. We don't require that, so some producers do, and others don't.

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.

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.)

I've considered running a campaign to finance a print run of some of our (SE's) books. But the fact is that it's just so easy to find super cheap paper copies of these books almost anywhere. As long as you buy a copy that was printed before, say, 2005 - or from a reputable publisher like Oxford or Penguin - then the edition will already be pro quality. (After that, it's much more likely that you're buying a print-on-demand copy of a raw Project Gutenberg text.)

If we did offer print books, I think the value-add would be making them extremely ornate, one-of-a-kind editions like Arion Press or Folio Society make, and we'd charge a lot for a copy. But even then I'm still not sure the juice would be worth the squeeze, because that's also been done to death... how many more fancy editions of Dracula or whatever does the world need?

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!

I'm not referring to the plastic bags that you put your own vegetables in, I mean that at many groceries, including the one near me, these vegetables come prepackaged by the store/distributor and you don't have a choice to buy 10 loose raw potatoes or a whole corn-on-the-cob in a raw husk.

Of course it depends on the store - but then do I drive an extra 15 mins (and emit all that carbon...) just to go to a different store with some loose veggies?