Editor-in-Chief here, happy to answer any questions!<p>Of interest might be my blog post on how SE runs on a small VPS using classic web tech: <a href="https://alexcabal.com/posts/standard-ebooks-and-classic-web-tech" rel="nofollow">https://alexcabal.com/posts/standard-ebooks-and-classic-web-...</a><p>(This post is slightly out of date as there <i>is</i> 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.)<p>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 <i>The Mystery of the Blue Train</i>. Check them out!<p>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 published a couple of books for the project during a sabbatical in 2021 (The Devil's Dictionary [0] and a cheesy, small H. Beam Piper book named Four-Day Planet).<p>The process and tools are quite nice and it's very rewarding to see your work in ebook form. It takes a _long_ time to proof and re-read a book, but it's surprising how many times you can do this and how differently you need to read to catch errors versus just enjoying the damn book.<p>The fascinating part of the project is a _strong_ editorial opinion, which IMO makes the project successful. There is a core group of people that upholds the standards for the project, and the resulting consistency of quality of output derives from that. The team clearly cares about the quality, and has demonstrably maintained that over the huge number of releases.<p>I even went to the archives of the "San Francisco Newletter and California Advertiser" to collect some of Bierce's original work, making it the most complete, and most corrected open-source version of the book. [1] The one previously hosted by Project Gutenburg was quite old and, frankly, quite riddled with transcription errors.<p>I haven't tried reading the Devil's Dictionary back-to-back since I published it, but I might one day. There's a lot of detail in this work that I never saw until I had it under a microscope.<p>[0] <a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ambrose-bierce/the-devils-dictionary" rel="nofollow">https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ambrose-bierce/the-devils-...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://archive.org/details/san-francisco-newletter-dec-11-1875" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/san-francisco-newletter-dec-11-1...</a>
For other curious HNers, what differentiates [0] them from Project Gutenberg [1] is the improved typography/styling and the full usage of modern reader techniques. Think of it like, etext != ebook.<p>[0] <a href="https://standardebooks.org/about/what-makes-standard-ebooks-different" rel="nofollow">https://standardebooks.org/about/what-makes-standard-ebooks-...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org" rel="nofollow">https://www.gutenberg.org</a>
I would love if they offered a download option for a file you could just upload to Lulu (or similar service) to have it printed and mailed to you.<p>Every time I buy one of these public domain books from Amazon, they are invariably shitty, low-quality "printed by Amazon" versions. I miss the time where you could get a high-quality hardcover, but more and more those seem reserved only for the current week's NYT best-seller books.
There are HTML versions but they don't seem to reflow<p>example:<p><a href="https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/rudolph-erich-raspe/the-surprising-adventures-of-baron-munchausen/text/single-page" rel="nofollow">https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/rudolph-erich-raspe/the-su...</a><p>A bit offtopic, but I never understood why .epub is a thing. For instance the linked HTML/XHTML version seems to work just fine (except for the reflow thing.. but I assume that a CSS issue)<p>.epub seems to be mostly HTML with a few pieces missing. I guess I don't understand why we needed a new format? and not just use a strict HTML subset?<p>I'd love some strict HTML subset that indicated the file can be used offline. I personally try to make all my webpages so that they can be saved to disk and opened from a single file (though if you embed images/videos this becomes problematic). But I don't have a way to indicate to a reader "Hey you can Ctrl+S this webpage". I'd publish .epub, but the browser won't open them
I have a question regarding books in other languages than English. Is there a technical reason for only allowing English or is it the legal aspect (knowing what is in public domain in countries other than the US) that hinders this?<p>For example I live in Iceland there is a number of texts that are in the public domain, for example the Edda and Icelandic sagas among others. But since we are very few (approximately 380K people) there is no comparable entity and most likely never will be, so the best and probably only way to get something similar would be to be a part of a larger organization.
I’m happy to see Standard Ebooks here! I’ve read their editions of Nostromo by Joseph Conrad and Vanity Fair by William Thackeray and the quality great. I recommend it if you’re interested in classic literature.
Who decides or sets the difficulty level of "reading ease" (which is a sortable metadata attribute on the search page) ?<p>Some classiications seem a bit ...nonintuitive. For example, the Autobiography of John Stuart Mill is classified as "very diffcult" whereas "The Tempest" by Shakespeare is classified as "fairly easy".<p>I would classify it the other way around, but what do I know, I'm a nonnative speaker anyway.
To have access to what I read and also remember it, I created recently a web app called bookeeper that exports your Kindle highlights to notion, generating a personalized summary of it with AI as well.
Try it here if you are interested:
<a href="https://bookeeper.io/?utm_source=hacker_news&utm_medium=book" rel="nofollow">https://bookeeper.io/?utm_source=hacker_news&utm_medium=book</a>
Standard Ebooks is fantastic! In fact, I love what they're doing so much that I actually built a little SaaS product on top of their ebook collection.<p>The site is called Modern Serial, and it lets you read books from Standard Ebooks in 10 minutes a day as Substack-style email newsletters.<p><a href="https://modernserial.com/" rel="nofollow">https://modernserial.com/</a>