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Standard Ebooks are awesome. If maintainers are seeing this: any plans to publish non-English books? Is there room to collaborate on adding support for it?
by ronjouch 6y ago
Standard Ebooks are awesome.
If maintainers are seeing this: any plans to publish non-English books? Is there room to collaborate on adding support for it?
- AdmiralAsshat 6y agoNot a maintainer, just an occasional contributor. https://standardebooks.org/contribute/accepted-ebooks https://standardebooks.org/contribute/accepted-ebooks > Types of ebooks we don’t accept > Non-English-language books. Translations to English are, of course, OK.
- ronjouch 6y agoYeah :-/ I know, that's why I'm asking if this can be reconsidered. As a non-English native speaker, I think it's a shame. Rather than read the English translation of Les Misérables, I'd rather read the original French text, and having Standard Ebooks as a source for non-English books means I can: 1. Discover / browse / search. 2. Expect high quality text & typography. 3. Be part of a high-volume community that archives and refines texts year after year. "Then build your own similar site with high-quality titles in French!" , I hear some say. Sure, but I see tons of excellent marketing & infrastructure already done by Standard Ebooks, which could be reused for non-English books! Said differently, mid/long term I see the greater good being achieved by supporting non-English titles in Standard Ebooks itself, not in one satellite mimic site per language, of varying maintenance quality. To compare with the domain of online encyclopedias, these are the same reasons to have en.wikipedia.org and fr.wikipedia.org maintained under one (Wikipedia) umbrella sharing infrastructure, not wikipedia.org and frenchwikipedia.org maintained by entirely different teams.
- richardjs 6y agoIt looks like the subject has come up a couple times on the mailing list [1] [2], but in my (admittedly casual) searching I didn't find anything since 2017, with the most relevant answer being "not at the moment". Since it has been a couple years, maybe it's worth bringing up again on the mailing list? [1] https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/standardebooks/c/JdVpCm3ckGg/discussion https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/standardebooks/c/JdVpCm3ckGg... [2] https://groups.google.com/g/standardebooks/c/osOEfs5HdLo/m/2SPCxiUVCQAJ https://groups.google.com/g/standardebooks/c/osOEfs5HdLo/m/2...
- ronjouch 6y agoThanks for the ML digging :) . Agreed, it's worth bringing up again on the mailing list; will do this week and post here a link to my message.
- derbOac 6y agoI was thinking that one of the problems with a lot of public domain translations is that the translations are extremely dated. So you're reading this text that you almost need a translation of that itself is a dated translation. This isn't the fault of Standard Ebooks, but it's an elephant in the room of public domain texts in general. In many ways I'd rather see effort put into crowdsourced or volunteer modern translation than into improved copyediting. It's especially problematic if you consider that the original text in the foreign language isn't available as well, as you're noting.
- hpfr 6y agoI guess that makes sense. They’re pretty rigorous about conforming to style and it’d be hard for the (presumably English-speaking) editors to uphold the same standards for a language they don’t share. Not to mention each language would probably require its own style guide. I know French literature often uses guillemets or a leading em dash where English uses quotes.
- ronjouch 6y agoI agree there would be work to do and policies to establish, but I don't see this as fundamentally blocking. Mistakes can/will be done, and fixed afterwards. It's the beauty of our online worlds.
- hombre_fatal 6y agoI have a longer response that explains why parameterizing the project around language isn't so straightforward. Nor does it necessarily make sense because the thing that SE brings to the table is English expertise. All of the work in polishing an epub is the chore of transcription and then nitty gritty details like correctly tagging things like roman numerals and embedded poems and following some sort of standardization guide. The thing that Standard Ebooks does, aside from being decisive over its standards, is then require the epub to go through a review process by its creator who is a domain expert in the craft. This expert bottleneck is a big reason why SE book quality is so reliable. Accepting other languages drastically changes and perhaps even relaxes this bottleneck and changes the whole organization. In another comment, I think you suggest that it might be time to try to persuade him to accept non-English books: > Agreed, it's worth bringing up again on the mailing list; will do this week and post here a link to my message. But it's not really up to persuasion. Because it takes more than an idea to expand the accepted languages. It requires at least one reliable expert in that language who can stand up a completely new set of tools and standards and then steward that project to fruition. And that's such a big undertaking that it's really a whole new project, not just yet another egg under SE's wings, but a whole new chicken coop. Suggesting that Standard Ebooks move to support other languages is 0.0000001% of the work towards that goal. People do that all the time, then claim "okay, I'll fork the project", and then fizzle out. Another example is that whole swathes of code in https://github.com/standardebooks/tools https://github.com/standardebooks/tools, SE's core workflow, become useless once you're targeting something other than English. By browsing their style guide and that repo, you'll realize that SE's value really is its focus on English. It's more of a suite of English tools than it is a epub editing kit, as the latter is the easy part.
- resdev 6y agoYou can find some non English book PDFs here - https://bookdark.com/ https://bookdark.com/ (which are sourced from Gutenberg catalog, but with dynamic navigation and search)
- hombre_fatal 6y agoI've been working on a "fork" for Spanish books under a new imprint that I will launch when I finish my 10th book (I'm about 60% along). One fact of reality is that Standard Ebooks' tooling is English-based. Everything from the pages/xhtml it generates to its typography tools to its style guide expects English. For example, Spanish uses — and «» instead of English's “” and ‘’ for dialogue so you can imagine how SE's punctuation tooling heuristics are going to differ here. You'd also have to come up with a new set of standards for another language. What sort of correction is a fair modernization and which would be unfair editorialization? SE itself already makes controversial decisions here for English like "to-day" -> "today". It would be a large undertaking to parameterize some sort of LANG=EN setting and imo not worth it. I think the only route for that sort of thing to happen is if 2+ "forks" get to Standard Ebooks' quality and then decide to work together years down the road. Also, legal clarity is sometimes an issue in other countries where an English translation written in the USA of that same work is clearly in the public domain. There are works where the original non-English content, despite being long translated into English, are still owned by the estate, but the English translation is liberated. Something I realized was just how many books exist only as scans. Transcription isn't very fun, but this makes it rewarding. For example, I have some early Spanish sci-fi books I've transcribed into epubs that you cannot find outside of dirty scans.
- ghostDancer 6y agoSorry for the OT but may I ask which tools are you using to process the books and how/where can you verify the legal situation of a book? I'm from Spain and just curious about it.
- nicolas_t 6y agoI'm super interested in those early Spanish sci-fi (mostly because I like sci-fi and I've been looking for more spanish reading material to practice with since it's been so long since I've lived in Spain). Are they publicly available.
- acabal 6y agoAs others mentioned, different languages have different typography rules. Our toolset is English-based and making it generic for any language would be extremely difficult and time consuming. Additionally, all of us read in (at least) English, and at least I can't credibly say I'm a grammar/typography expert in any other language. In the past people have expressed interest in forking the toolset for other languages, which is totally fine. But I don't think I've seen any of those attempts come to fruition yet.
- ronjouch 6y agoHi! Thanks for chiming in :) In another comment of this sub-thread ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25140605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25140605 ) I wrote: > "Still, I like SE a lot and might be interested in doing the work. So, I'll make my point to the ML (expanding on A. points I brought here, and B. contradictions that commenters brought), asking if folks are convinced by the vision, and asking for technical advice to build the incremental path. Then if there's agreement, maybe I, or someone else, will commit to it." Do you think it remains worthwhile that I bring the discussion, or is it 100% nailed among current maintainers that the "incremental path" I'm hoping for doesn't exist and "just fork / do your own thing for your language and register your domain" is already the consensus?