Standard Ebooks: liberated ebooks, carefully produced for the true book lover

> The backlog there is pretty insane even while finishing upwards of 150 ebooks per month

Isn't the backlog there mostly in the post-processing step, though? To the point where they're taking finished texts and running them again through the page-by-page proofreading in hope of fishing out more OCR typos and improving the format markup?

You can also contribute at Wikisource if you prefer, that doesn't really have a post-processing step and has much less of a fixed pipeline. (There are explicit "proofreading" and "verification" steps per page, but not much beyond that.)

> doesn't have quite as robust processes

They do have a double-pass system for all works based on scanned pages, which is quite nifty. Green means two passes complete: https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Index:Sophocles%27_King_Oed...

Plus you can just jump in to any work, in true wiki fashion.

It's unclear that that would save time. If you put in enough hours to the project, you can get classified as one of those later pass proofers. That is extremely taxing work because most of the scannos have already been found by the earlier proofers. You will "complete" multiple pages without ever finding a scanno. The doubt starts to set in if you are on auto-pilot or not.

Meanwhile, in that early stage, because of the stream of errors, it is easy to pay attention and feel like you are doing rewarding work. Moreover, if you are quite quick and diligent, you can basically just read a book as volunteer work.

Also, sometimes the error is in the source material. Different editors have different opinions about what should be done there. Sometimes I had to re-add mistakes that were "fixed" by early proofers trying to correct grammar, if I recall correctly... it was a while back that I volunteered.

The most confusing errors are the ones spellcheck doesn't catch because they transform a word into a valid word. But it's them that we want the least.

Unless tne is an abbreviation and so it should pass. Names are a common place where people make up weird spellings and so spell checkers are annoying. I have terrible spelling, and yet most of the time I run spellcheck it is tripping up on words that are spelled correct but not in the dictionary (in large part because I run spell check after each revision: words spelled wrong . Add to dictionary means that my dictionary is polluted with words that only apply to one document and would be wrong in the next)

An LLM-based spellchecker would've caught it for sure. I am working on one here: https://github.com/pulkitsharma07/spelltastic.io, If anyone has suggestions on how this can help in Project Gutenberg / Standard Ebook's workflows, please reach out to me / open an issue.

I have seen that LLMs are pretty good at understanding context/domain / theme-specific terms, so their spellchecking is pretty good.

Running spellcheck is a standard step on every page of proofreading. There's a "wordcheck" button in proofing UI.

the distributed proofreaders process does include a mandatory spellcheck

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;+}

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.

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.

In addition to what Robin mentioned below, some of these placeholders are for books on our Wanted list. I also think it's useful to show readers that particular books are looking for volunteers to produce, and also to show that some books they might want are locked away by copyright for possibly decades. In that sense it's partly a political message.

Whenever we add a collection, the books that are in that collection but not yet in PD in the US get placeholders. But a filter might not be a bad idea.

I read on an old Kobo, using Kepub files. Their Kepub renderer is quite good.

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.

A note for Kobo users: a lot of us (myself included) use Calibre to manage and upload our ebooks. Something about Calibre messes up Kepub files and strips out a lot of the formatting (including the book’s cover).

If I want to appreciate a nice Kepub from Standard Ebooks, I upload it directly to the Kobo.

A Kobo would be a great choice. I use a Kobo Libra 2 and love it a lot more than my old Kindle Paperwhite that got stolen: https://gl.kobobooks.com/products/kobo-libra-2 The Kobo Sage is also good because it has an 8" screen.

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...

I recently purchased a Pocketbook Era. It is pretty much the perfect device for me - supports open standards and does not require any cloud account signups to start using it. It is not hostile to the user, 3rd party applications such as Koreader can be simply dropped in and they appear in the menus without any shenanigans like jailbreaking or custom launchers needed.

In my ideal world all devices would be like this.

Piggybacking: for computers, what is a good epub viewer?

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)

KOReader for Kindle? https://github.com/koreader/koreader

It does a good job of modernising old Kindles.

For Android, Moon Reader Pro.

Unmatched UI tweaking features which make reading a pleasure. Syncs bookmarks with cloud services, thus across different devices.

My Kindle is 8 years old and works excellent with standard ebooks. I think you can select any device that you prefer and it will be good.

We don't have a list of authors yet, but that's a good idea to add!

https://standardebooks.org/bulk-downloads/authors

Links in the first column.

Standard Ebooks only works on English-language books, as typography varies between languages and we're only experts in English.

Same for me. I think it's english only.

There are around a dozen collections on the (not prominently featured) collections page[1] like Le Monde's 100 Best Books of the Century and Modern Library's 100 Best Novels, etc.

1. <https://standardebooks.org/collections>

You’re spot on with this. I recently converted a local history book from 1911 to Markdown, ePub and HTML and tracked the changes on GitHub. Only a handful of copies of this book exist in physical form and it has been photo copied (which is great).

However, I was completely shot down by the local library when I was discussing it with them. They said they already had a photo copy and didn’t need anymore digital editions, I tried to explain the benefits of having it in a machine readable format but they wouldn’t entertain it. I completed the project for me, so I wasn’t too bothered, but thought they might have been interested in archiving it but they weren’t.

My general feeling is that they didn’t like an outsider contributing and touching on a format they didn’t know so got slightly defensive.

Yes, you signal your intent on the mailing list subject to approval by the editor-in-chief

This is not entirely correct - Kobo also expects a bunch of special <span>s inserted for things like highlighting and page numbers to work.

It kills me that Kobo is so close to having plain epubs rendered with Webkit but for some reason they just won't take the leap!

And https://send.djazz.se automatically performs the conversion for you with kepubify and sends it to your ereader! No affiliation, just a happy camper chiming in

the only issues i've found with koreader is its default margin size and its display of standard ebooks' titlepages but (I believe) these can be fixed with a fairly simple user tweaks css

Yeah, if you just load normal epubs it defaults to an old version of Adobe Digital Editions unfortunately.

Weird. Why the explicit rule against them?

I understand if the existing editors can't personally proofread the submissions, but that's why peer-review exists. Or an open-source project in general where people can post corrections. Jimbo Wales didn't need to speak a hundred languages to launch Wikipedia.

You can get drm free audiobooks from libro and you can strip drm from kindle and audible books with calibre and libation.

Much too tight leading for a book text.

This is a leading you'd see on the ingredients list of an energy bar packaging.

The other choices are fine.

Caveat: I studied typography and worked in that field for a decade.

I love this project and don't want to disparage the work that goes into it, but 900 USD, and it has to be a book that is already transcribed online? That seems a bit much to me.