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As with every thread like this (seriously, tell me if you want me to stop) I’d recommend the project I contribute to: Standard eBooks: https://standardebooks.or

As with every thread like this (seriously, tell me if you want me to stop) I’d recommend the project I contribute to: Standard eBooks: https://standardebooks.org/ https://standardebooks.org/ . We take the Gutenberg transcriptions and prep high quality electronic editions, then proofread against the original scans to make sure all the formatting is properly represented, and finally release them as public domain again. Being limited to pre-1923 means that we’ve focused on the ‘classics’, but we’re always doing more and should break through the 200 mark shortly. Currently I’m producing a Woolf and Pepys’ Diaries (although that last one is definitely a long term project). Let me know if there’s a book you specifically want to see produced and I can add it to the list or help you produce it yourself.

mehrzad 8y ago
That's wonderful and I will be recommending it to my friends from now on, but I've found in my experience of reading classic literature, it's at least sometimes much more useful to read such books with modern annotations, which is why I just check out annotated versions from my local libraries.
- robin_reala 8y ago
  The Pepys I’m working on at the moment is stuffed full of footnotes (check the Gutenberg source); I’m currently nearing the 700th. These are being converted to a standard ePub endnote format, so compatible readers, i.e. most of them, will get popup modals with the annotation when you click on the note number.
mrob 8y ago
A warning: these books are not the original editions, but edited versions with modernized spelling and grammar. The editorial changes are kept in version control so they could theoretically be reverted, but they are mixed with the technical changes so in practice this is not easy. Some people might prefer the changes, but when I read classics I want to read something as close as possible to what the author originally wrote. Despite the name, "Standard Ebooks" are actually non-standard.
- acabal 8y ago
  To clarify, SE does not modernize grammar. 99% of the (very light) modernization we do is one-to-one spelling changes for wildly archaic spellings like "shew -> show" or "swop -> swap" or "to-night -> tonight". Grammar is left alone. Whether or not you prefer slightly modernized spelling is a matter of taste, and something I've discussed at length in previous HN comments. (So I won't repeat myself here.) At SE we take the same stance as editors going back generations, who have all been quietly modernizing spelling right under everyone's noses as a matter of course since Shakespeare's days.
  - mrob 8y ago
    From Wikipedia's "grammar" article: "Outside linguistics, the term grammar is often used in a rather different sense. In some respects, it may be used more broadly, including rules of spelling and punctuation, which linguists would not typically consider to form part of grammar, but rather as a part of orthography, the set of conventions used for writing a language." In common usage, punctuation is often considered part of grammar. This matches well with the computer science meaning of grammar (rules for parsing), because punctuation can change the meaning of a sentence.
    - acabal 8y ago
      Of course. We do not change punctuation, with a few exceptions for some short-lived archaic constructs like comma-emdash. We do change from single-quoted British style to double-quoted American style, but I think most everyone would agree that that is merely a presentational change that does not change the actual grammar of a sentence. (And that in and of itself was a very common thing for editors to do going back hundreds of years too!)
      - jjgreen 8y ago
        That seems an odd thing to want to change. Do you also move proximal punctuation inside the quotes, AE-style?
  - 8y ago
JoeDaDude 8y ago
Thanks for posting, awesome resource! I was surprised to see recent science fiction works and authors, like Phillip K. Dick and Algis Budrys, which I would expect had been published well after the 1923 copyright deadline.
- robin_reala 8y ago
  They are, but there was a point in the 50s I believe when copyright in the US had to be renewed, and that didn’t happen for a bunch of sci-fi and pulp.
pmoriarty 8y ago
Also see LibriVox[1], where volunteers convert public domain books (many of them from Project Gutenberg) to freely-available audiobooks. [1] - https://librivox.org/ https://librivox.org/
stephth 8y ago
This is amazing. Thank you. In your experience what’s the most convenient e-ink device for free ebooks? Ie Kindle is optimized for amazon so probably not the most convenient for this.
- robin_reala 8y ago
  It’s not the easiest to get SE books onto Kindle unfortunately, though we obviously supply them. I personally read on a Kobo, and I think they’re starting to be available in the US now? You can just drag and drop our kepubs into the mass storage and it’ll import them. Apple Books works well too if you’ve got an iDevice (although there’s a lingering bug with forced page breaks that I really need to fix).
buzzdenver 8y ago
Are the books supposed to work with Kindle Paperwhite? I am trying to email it to my account and Amazon is saying that it cannot be converted. Super cool project!
- Klover 8y ago
  Have you read https://standardebooks.org/help/how-to-use-our-ebooks https://standardebooks.org/help/how-to-use-our-ebooks and tried it yet? Your device is listed!
  - buzzdenver 8y ago
    I have yes. Emailing the file to an address associated with the Kindle is also a standard way to upload a book. That's why I was thinking that this must be some sort of bug. BTW I tried to upload Pride and Prejudice.
    - darren_ 8y ago
      Might be late / irrelevant but a while back amazon was failing to convert anything i emailed to my kindle and it turned out to be that i wasn't specifying a subject line in the mail. once i did that the very same files started working.
ryanmarsh 8y ago
Thank you! We homeschool and use a “classical” program focused primarily on grammar, rhetoric, and logic. Resources like yours increase our children’s access to classical literature while helping us reduce book costs (which can be surprisingly high).
jpfr 8y ago
This is a great project! Sadly SE has a focus on ePub and similar formats. These are impossible from a typographical standpoint. Text in ePub reader apps always comes out with a ragged right or impossible word breaks. Latex with the microtype package is the only solution that does text justification on the level of a human professional. Can’t SE convert to that and provide PDF for common screen sizes? It would be so easy if only Project Gutenberg had a standardized master source format. So conversion tools can be built around that. But all efforts in that direction were killed of by trolls in the community.
- jimpudar 8y ago
  All the source files of standardebooks.org books are up on Github, it might be possible to write a script to automatically convert the files to LaTeX.
  - lou1306 8y ago
    Pandoc [0] could probably do most of the heavy lifting, starting from the ePub files (after all, an ePub is just an archive containing HTML, CSS, images, and metadata) [0]: http://pandoc.org/ http://pandoc.org/
- gavinpc 8y ago
  I spent a lot of time with Gutenberg epubs in a former life, and I found that their quality was far better than most other digitizers with comparable scale. However, the tables of contents were extremely inconsistent and I had to essentially rewrite them to get anything like a usable outline. SE looks interesting. I don't have an epub reader handy but I will definitely be back to understand the motivation (knowing it's a lot of work to do this sort of thing).
  - robin_reala 8y ago
    SE books all have rebuilt ToCs, yes. Gutenberg’s ones follow the presentation of the original scans, which basically isn’t useful for an ereading experience.

mehrzad 8y ago

That's wonderful and I will be recommending it to my friends from now on, but I've found in my experience of reading classic literature, it's at least sometimes much more useful to read such books with modern annotations, which is why I just check out annotated versions from my local libraries.

robin_reala 8y ago
The Pepys I’m working on at the moment is stuffed full of footnotes (check the Gutenberg source); I’m currently nearing the 700th. These are being converted to a standard ePub endnote format, so compatible readers, i.e. most of them, will get popup modals with the annotation when you click on the note number.

mrob 8y ago

A warning: these books are not the original editions, but edited versions with modernized spelling and grammar. The editorial changes are kept in version control so they could theoretically be reverted, but they are mixed with the technical changes so in practice this is not easy. Some people might prefer the changes, but when I read classics I want to read something as close as possible to what the author originally wrote. Despite the name, "Standard Ebooks" are actually non-standard.

acabal 8y ago
To clarify, SE does not modernize grammar. 99% of the (very light) modernization we do is one-to-one spelling changes for wildly archaic spellings like "shew -> show" or "swop -> swap" or "to-night -> tonight". Grammar is left alone. Whether or not you prefer slightly modernized spelling is a matter of taste, and something I've discussed at length in previous HN comments. (So I won't repeat myself here.) At SE we take the same stance as editors going back generations, who have all been quietly modernizing spelling right under everyone's noses as a matter of course since Shakespeare's days.
- mrob 8y ago
  From Wikipedia's "grammar" article: "Outside linguistics, the term grammar is often used in a rather different sense. In some respects, it may be used more broadly, including rules of spelling and punctuation, which linguists would not typically consider to form part of grammar, but rather as a part of orthography, the set of conventions used for writing a language." In common usage, punctuation is often considered part of grammar. This matches well with the computer science meaning of grammar (rules for parsing), because punctuation can change the meaning of a sentence.
  - acabal 8y ago
    Of course. We do not change punctuation, with a few exceptions for some short-lived archaic constructs like comma-emdash. We do change from single-quoted British style to double-quoted American style, but I think most everyone would agree that that is merely a presentational change that does not change the actual grammar of a sentence. (And that in and of itself was a very common thing for editors to do going back hundreds of years too!)
    - jjgreen 8y ago
      That seems an odd thing to want to change. Do you also move proximal punctuation inside the quotes, AE-style?
- 8y ago

JoeDaDude 8y ago

Thanks for posting, awesome resource! I was surprised to see recent science fiction works and authors, like Phillip K. Dick and Algis Budrys, which I would expect had been published well after the 1923 copyright deadline.

robin_reala 8y ago
They are, but there was a point in the 50s I believe when copyright in the US had to be renewed, and that didn’t happen for a bunch of sci-fi and pulp.

pmoriarty 8y ago

Also see LibriVox[1], where volunteers convert public domain books (many of them from Project Gutenberg) to freely-available audiobooks. [1] - https://librivox.org/ https://librivox.org/

stephth 8y ago

This is amazing. Thank you. In your experience what’s the most convenient e-ink device for free ebooks? Ie Kindle is optimized for amazon so probably not the most convenient for this.

robin_reala 8y ago
It’s not the easiest to get SE books onto Kindle unfortunately, though we obviously supply them. I personally read on a Kobo, and I think they’re starting to be available in the US now? You can just drag and drop our kepubs into the mass storage and it’ll import them. Apple Books works well too if you’ve got an iDevice (although there’s a lingering bug with forced page breaks that I really need to fix).

buzzdenver 8y ago

Are the books supposed to work with Kindle Paperwhite? I am trying to email it to my account and Amazon is saying that it cannot be converted. Super cool project!

Klover 8y ago
Have you read https://standardebooks.org/help/how-to-use-our-ebooks https://standardebooks.org/help/how-to-use-our-ebooks and tried it yet? Your device is listed!
- buzzdenver 8y ago
  I have yes. Emailing the file to an address associated with the Kindle is also a standard way to upload a book. That's why I was thinking that this must be some sort of bug. BTW I tried to upload Pride and Prejudice.
  - darren_ 8y ago
    Might be late / irrelevant but a while back amazon was failing to convert anything i emailed to my kindle and it turned out to be that i wasn't specifying a subject line in the mail. once i did that the very same files started working.

ryanmarsh 8y ago

Thank you! We homeschool and use a “classical” program focused primarily on grammar, rhetoric, and logic. Resources like yours increase our children’s access to classical literature while helping us reduce book costs (which can be surprisingly high).

jpfr 8y ago

This is a great project! Sadly SE has a focus on ePub and similar formats. These are impossible from a typographical standpoint. Text in ePub reader apps always comes out with a ragged right or impossible word breaks. Latex with the microtype package is the only solution that does text justification on the level of a human professional. Can’t SE convert to that and provide PDF for common screen sizes? It would be so easy if only Project Gutenberg had a standardized master source format. So conversion tools can be built around that. But all efforts in that direction were killed of by trolls in the community.

jimpudar 8y ago
All the source files of standardebooks.org books are up on Github, it might be possible to write a script to automatically convert the files to LaTeX.
- lou1306 8y ago
  Pandoc [0] could probably do most of the heavy lifting, starting from the ePub files (after all, an ePub is just an archive containing HTML, CSS, images, and metadata) [0]: http://pandoc.org/ http://pandoc.org/
gavinpc 8y ago
I spent a lot of time with Gutenberg epubs in a former life, and I found that their quality was far better than most other digitizers with comparable scale. However, the tables of contents were extremely inconsistent and I had to essentially rewrite them to get anything like a usable outline. SE looks interesting. I don't have an epub reader handy but I will definitely be back to understand the motivation (knowing it's a lot of work to do this sort of thing).
- robin_reala 8y ago
  SE books all have rebuilt ToCs, yes. Gutenberg’s ones follow the presentation of the original scans, which basically isn’t useful for an ereading experience.