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Not a maintainer, just an occasional contributor. https://standardebooks.org/contribute/accepted-ebooks https://standardebooks.org/contribute/accepted-ebooks

Not 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 ago
Yeah :-/ 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 ago
  It 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 ago
    Thanks 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 ago
  I 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 ago
I 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    I 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.

ronjouch 6y ago

Yeah :-/ 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 ago
It 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 ago
  Thanks 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 ago
I 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 ago

I 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 ago
I 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 ago
  I 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.