5 ms·
Project is too small, from my understanding (I'm only a contributor, not a core team member). You can see from the contribution guidelines[0]: Ebooks that ar
by AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
Project is too small, from my understanding (I'm only a contributor, not a core team member). You can see from the contribution guidelines[0]:
Ebooks that are not clearly in the U.S. public domain. If it’s not on Gutenberg, we’ll probably decline it.
So we're basically piggybacking off of the copyright verification work we assume that PG has already done. This is one of the reasons I haven't started The Worm Ourboros yet--it's in Australia's Gutenberg archive, but not the US one.
[0]https://standardebooks.org/contribute/accepted-ebooks https://standardebooks.org/contribute/accepted-ebooks
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Miraste 7y agoWait, so what do you do that Gutenberg doesn't?
- _hyn3 7y agoSeems like the website describes it pretty well: https://standardebooks.org/ https://standardebooks.org/
- AdmiralAsshat 7y agoGutenberg does amazing work. Full stop. With that said, their specialty is in the transcription part. If you try reading one of their public domain works on a Kindle, they're often full of formatting problems and typos, since the transcripts are sometimes sourced from OCR scans. I've known people who tried starting a free book from Gutenberg, but eventually gave up and bought the same e-book off Amazon for a dollar because it at least had a working TOC. That kind of sale saddens me greatly. The end-user thinks, "Ah, it was only a dollar, I got my money's worth," but the publisher has basically paid nothing for the work, adds a few hours of digital typesetting, and then makes 100% profit on the sale. Standard Ebooks often uses the Gutenberg raw text as a starting point and then cleans it up. We have a set of tools used for the initial cleanup process[0] that handles pagination, TOC generation, and some other basic "modernization" steps. The texts are then proofread and edited to conform to our style guide[1], which aims for maximizing readability on modern e-reader devices, as well as adding semantic meaning to any text markup. You can look at the guide for producing such a book to get a better idea of the process.[2] The end result is a free, public domain work which looks and feels like a professional production. [0] https://github.com/standardebooks/tools https://github.com/standardebooks/tools [1] https://standardebooks.org/contribute/typography https://standardebooks.org/contribute/typography [2] https://standardebooks.org/contribute/producing-an-ebook-step-by-step https://standardebooks.org/contribute/producing-an-ebook-ste...
- toomuchtodo 7y agoFantastic comment, thank you for your efforts (and the rest of the folks at standardebooks.org). I haven't looked, but I'd ask that whenever possible, final artifacts are also uploaded to the Internet Archive.