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Standard Ebooks' 1,000th title: Ulysses
- resource_waste 2y agoHappy to find this website, nice to have soo much philosophy in 1 place. https://standardebooks.org/ebooks?page=1&tags%5B0%5D=philosophy https://standardebooks.org/ebooks?page=1&tags%5B0%5D=philoso... I just hate trying to google search to get an epub.
- kseistrup 2y agoAnother impressive ebook site is Global Grey: https://www.globalgreyebooks.com/ https://www.globalgreyebooks.com/
- Avid8329 2y ago> This Standard Ebooks edition is based on a transcription of the 1922 Shakespeare and Company first edition, with emendations from pre-1929 errata lists and the second edition in its 1927 ninth printing by Shakespeare and Company. It does not track any one particular edition, but rather is a blend of pre-1929 editions that aims to contain what scholars might consider to be the most accurate version of what was printed before 1929. Therefore, various probable misprints have been retained that may have been corrected in post-1929 editions. Consultation of various editions of the book and the historical collation list appended to Hans Walter Gabler’s Critical and Synoptic Edition is advised before contacting Standard Ebooks about potential mistakes. As someone who is fascinated with the textual history of Ulysses, this is going to raise some hackles.
- idoubtit 2y agoTheir edition is based on this. That does not mean it is faithful to it. For instance, if they followed their guideline, their edition modernized the text with modern US typography and conventions. See https://standardebooks.org/contribute/producing-an-ebook-step-by-step#modernize https://standardebooks.org/contribute/producing-an-ebook-ste...
- acabal 2y agoYou are correct that we usually do that, however for Ulysses we made an exception and transcribed the print exactly, so there are no changes from the print edition. (Except for whatever pre-1929 corrections we brought in based on our research.)
- fjfaase 2y agoThe 'introduction' mentions Hans Walter Gabler’s book 'Critical and Synoptic Edition' (in 3 volumes) that compares all the different editions and notes all the (often small) differences. I feel it typically a book that would be much more worth in digital form. (It would be nice if the author would allow it to be digitized.) If one would have the digital form of all the editions, it would be much easier to compare them. I am aware that this will be an enormous effort.
- Archelaos 2y agoCould they not have waited until 16 June to publish it!
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- Jun8 2y ago“… with a reading ease of 74.9 (fairly easy)“ Fairly easy my foot! This rating aside, thanks for a great project.
- complaintdept 2y ago00.0 must be the output of /dev/random
- robin_reala 2y agoYeah, our reading score isn’t always perfect. I had to fix it for the Mina Loy collection[1] I did as because it’s free-form poetry without many full stops it thought the sentences were so long that it awarded it a negative score. I’ll look to see if there’s any obvious reason why this is being marked as fairly easy, but it’s probably an issue with the standard algorithm we use more than the code. [1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/mina-loy/poetry https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/mina-loy/poetry
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- ramijames 2y agoI'm so grateful that this is being done. Many free ebooks are high-quality content in a low-quality format.
- freedomben 2y agoIndeed, this is such an incredible and important project. Anyone who has tried to get free and/or public domain works in ebook format knows how bad the situation is. Some versions are good, but most are poor inputs processed through outdated and error-prone OCR. I'm extremely grateful to have even that, but the need for this project is very real. I'll be supporting financially when I can, but until then if anyone involved is reading, please accept my heartfelt thanks and appreciation for your noble efforts.
- tantivy 2y agoMany paid ebooks are in a low-quality format too. I've bought Kindle books from real, well-known publishing houses that had obviously not had a single proofreader go through after their OCR. A motivated volunteer would've done so much better.
- sherr 2y agoI agree. I stopped reading on the kindle years ago because I got so fed up with the terrible mistakes in the text. Not just spelling but also formatting. I love paper books. Having said that, Standard EBooks are very good.
- AlbertCory 2y ago> a reading ease of 74.9 (fairly easy) Well, Joyce did say that it was just a lot of jokes. ========================= Episode 14 - Oxen Of The Sun DESHIL HOLLES EAMUS. DESHIL HOLLES EAMUS. DESHIL HOLES Eamus. Send us, bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. Send us, bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. Send us bright one, light one, Horhorn, quickening and wombfruit. Hoopsa, boyaboy, hoopsa! Hoopsa, hoyaboy, hoopsa! Hoopsa, boyaboy, hoopsa. Universally that person's acumen is esteemed very little perceptive concerning whatsoever matters are being held as most profitable by mortals with sapience endowed to be studied who is ignorant of that which the most in doctrine erudite and certainly by reason of that in them high mind's ornament deserving of veneration constantly maintain when by general consent they affirm that other circumstances being equal by no exterior splendour is the .....
- readthenotes1 2y agoReading ease: each word makes sense. -25.1 points for no 4 words in a row making sense.
- retrac 2y agoIt's fairly easy... if you also speak French, Italian, Latin, and probably Ancient Greek. I don't and I know I missed a lot. I remember a lot of bilingual French/English wordplay through worked. He was multilingual and the puns/kennings are also.
- comonoid 2y agoThat should read "a reading ease: Ulysses".
- acabal 2y agoYes, it's a bit silly! The reason the score is so off is because we use the Flesch Reading Ease algorithm[1] to calculate it, which was designed for the US Navy to be able to score technical manuals. It works very well for most prose too... except highly modernist prose! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch-Kincaid_Reading_Ease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch-Kincaid_Reading_Ease
- mikub 2y agoYou boys and girls are doing an fantastic job. I read alot of the old classics thanks to you.
- technothrasher 2y agoMe too! I just finished Ivanhoe and was just heading over to Standard Ebooks to find another one.
- daveoc64 2y agoI love the project, but it really does need a way to find the most popular books: https://github.com/standardebooks/web/issues/298 https://github.com/standardebooks/web/issues/298
- chasil 2y agoGutenberg.org is reporting the number of downloads; can't this be used? Are these two organizations otherwise not on friendly terms, and able to exchange ebooks?
- robin_reala 2y agoWe talk a fair bit! Gutenberg is the source for 95%+ of our productions, and personally I upstream any transcription issues I find. What differs though is the mission. Gutenberg generally wants accurate digital translations of the original source texts, whereas Standard Ebooks tries to balance that out with better readability. Both are valid approaches, and there’s space for both of us.
- chasil 2y agoJust curious... do you ever reach a consensus on a text that you decide to share between you? Can you actually share the full .EPUB file, or do they object to the expanded size with bundled fonts and formatting, resulting in identical HTML but otherwise different content in the ZIP?
- robin_reala 2y agoIt hasn’t happened before but never say never. What we do do though sometimes is contribute our own transcriptions to Gutenberg first, then use that as a base for the Standard Ebooks version.
- cdrini 2y agoIt seems like we need to trigger another import -- we only have 491 of their 1,000! But you can search Standard Ebooks books in Open Library. Here they are sorted by how many people have added them to their reading log: https://openlibrary.org/search?q=id_standard_ebooks%3A%2A&mode=everything&sort=readinglog https://openlibrary.org/search?q=id_standard_ebooks%3A%2A&mo... Or by rating: https://openlibrary.org/search?q=id_standard_ebooks%3A%2A&mode=everything&sort=rating https://openlibrary.org/search?q=id_standard_ebooks%3A%2A&mo... Or by first published! https://openlibrary.org/search?q=id_standard_ebooks%3A%2A&mode=everything&sort=old https://openlibrary.org/search?q=id_standard_ebooks%3A%2A&mo... I created an issue to kick off another import: https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/9372 https://github.com/internetarchive/openlibrary/issues/9372
- mordechai9000 2y ago"reading ease of 74.9 (fairly easy)" "O, rocks! she said. Tell us in plain words."
- madcaptenor 2y agoI didn't know about this project but I'm really glad you're doing it. How do you choose which books to do?
- acabal 2y agoOur volunteers pick what books they personally want to work on. Those books have to meet our collections policy criteria: https://standardebooks.org/contribute/collections-policy https://standardebooks.org/contribute/collections-policy
- LVB 2y agoThis site works surprisingly poorly in Firefox (Mac). When I click a link, I usually get a blank page along with some CSP errors and have to refresh. No problems in Safari or Chrome.
- rafram 2y agoRestart your browser? I use this site frequently in Firefox on macOS and have no issues.
- robin_reala 2y agoI use Firefox on Mac and work on the site, and I have to say that I’ve never seen that. Something to do with an extension maybe?
- LVB 2y agoGood call. It turned out to be React Developer Tools causing the issues.
- poulpy123 2y agoFYI > Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven effort to produce a collection of high quality, carefully formatted, accessible, open source, and free public domain ebooks that meet or exceed the quality of commercially produced ebooks. I'm looking at doing that for calculus made easy by sylvanus Thompson but I need to overcome my lazyness first
- robin_reala 2y agoYou can use Standard Ebooks tooling to create a white-label ebook skeleton if that would help you get started.
- gjm11 2y agoSomeone else has done something similar for that work: https://www.sunclipse.org/?p=3194 https://www.sunclipse.org/?p=3194 -- you might find either that what he's done is good enough to satisfy you, or that you can build on what he did.
- poulpy123 2y agoThat's a great news, thanks !
- jarvist 2y agoThat's great! Their motivation & updates seem very sensible. Calculus Made Easy is a very nice compact book for university students who have started to forgot their high school training, and I will certainly point people in the direction of this project.
- hedora 2y agoIf you want the opposite of that: University students that come into college with strong calculus fundamentals, then I suggest "Calculus" by Michael Spivak. I haven't used calculus in a decade, but I use things I learned from working through that book pretty much every day I write code.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
- joaorico 2y agoFor anyone diving into Ulysses, I highly recommend checking out The Joyce Project [1]. It's filled with interactive notes that are very useful for understanding the linguistic and cultural references. Here's my reading method that I found effective: 1. Read a section on paper. 2. Go through the same section on the site. 3. (Re-)read on paper. I toggled between 1-2-3, 1-2, or 2-3 depending on my mood, and it worked really well. [1] https://www.joyceproject.com/ https://www.joyceproject.com/
- WilTimSon 2y agoI'll say this, with the caveat that I never did finish the book due to unrelated reasons, this is an excellent method. One may think "It's fine, I'll simply read the text and then, if I have questions, absorb some scholarly articles on it." Trust me, you will enjoy it so much more when you understand Joyce's intent and clever writing as it happens. You simply can't take it all in post-factum, too much would be missed.
- tame3902 2y agoThere also is https://www.ulyssesguide.com https://www.ulyssesguide.com. It has episode guides, which explain what actually happens in each chapter (this can sometimes be difficult to decifer), the cross references to other chapters, and sometimes possible interpretations. I found that extremely helpful and would have missed a ton without even noticing.
- ljsprague 2y agoIs the effort worth it?
- beezlebroxxxxxx 2y agoIf you're a fan of modernist literature or of literature as an at form, undoubtedly yes. If you're just interested in reading it because it is (justifiably, in my opinion) famous, then possibly. It's a bit like reading and studying the Bible if you're not religious. Will you come out having read and studied one of the foundational texts in English literature, able to approach later texts with fresh eyes to the unending allusions it spawned? Yep. Will it be 'worth it', though, in a revelatory sense? That's up to you in the end.
- ckmate-king-2 2y ago1. I think "fairly easy" badly mischaracterizes its difficulty. 2. I found Harry Blackmire, The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses, very helpful.
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- JusticeJuice 2y agoCongratulations!
- kstrauser 2y agoI have never loathed a book so much. I read every page out of a stubborn refusal to let it beat me, then put it high up on a back shelf so I'd never have to see it again. It's not that there was nothing of value in it. Sure, there is! It's more that the return on investment just wasn't worth it. My experience was like walking through a desert to find a candy bar. Even if it's a good candy bar, that's way too much of a hassle to go through to get it. I do hugely appreciate Standard Ebooks, though. Such a wonderful project!
- julianeon 2y agoAs I was reading I felt like my 'visibility' at any given time was only like 1-1.5 pages into the past. Sometimes less. Meaning the context for what I was reading, my understanding, went back about that far. So I basically experienced it as "word soup" with some identifiable parts in like the last page, that I could sort-of kind-of divine a narrative from, somewhat.
- AlbertCory 2y agoSame. I actually took a course on Ulysses, taught by a guy who's been teaching it for 50 years. So that's about as ideal a reading experience as you can have. Verdict: meh. Revolutionary for its time, maybe (100 years ago).
- bowsamic 2y ago100 years ago is very recent
- block_dagger 2y agoI had the exact same experience. Struggled through it, searched hard for the genius that was supposedly exuding from the pages. I didn't see any of it and I don't remember a lick of the story. I was simply bored. Perhaps I'm not intellectual enough to "get it."
- kstrauser 2y agoSame, same. I'm an avid reader. I don't shy away from complex literature. I also don't take great pleasure from overcomplication. Computing analogy: It's like seeing that someone wrote "fizzbuzz" using a microservice architecture, quantum computing, multiple LLMs, and some custom hardware. Bravo! Cool that you pulled it off and made this monstrosity! I don't want to use it though, nor do I care to see the details of every bizarre choice, and I'm not impressed at the number of references to COBOL that you shoved into the diode layouts of the CPU you invented for it. I can see why other people would find it fascinating. I am not one of them.
- g9yuayon 2y ago> 268,481 words (16 hours 17 minutes) with a reading ease of 74.9 (fairly easy) It's interesting when China introduced Ulysses years ago, publishers and reviewers often mentioned that how challenging the novel was. Often cited reasons included extensive use of stream of consciousness, long and complicated inner monologue, multiple languages and idioms used, and large vocabulary.
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- kabdib 2y agoI listened to an audiobook lecture about Ulysses, and that helped me understand the book better (at least through one professor's own opinions). It took me six attempts to get through Gravity's Rainbow (and it was worth it). My record is still just about halfway through Ulysses before I put it down for a year or two. Still worthwhile.
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- pentagrama 2y ago> Standard Ebooks' 1,000th title: Ulysses On that page I'm not finding that is the 1,000th title, and browsing around the site I can't find a counter either. I trust the OP who choose that title is right, but there is any title counter on the Standard Ebooks website?
- acabal 2y agoThere is no counter online, but you can trust me (the S.E. Editor-in-Chief) when I say I used Bash to count them :)
- pentagrama 2y agoThank you!
- SamBam 2y agoLooks very good, although I'm surprised there isn't a page in the book detailing the date of first publication, the name and artist of the cover image, maybe the date the copyright expired, and all that kind of information. (I was particularly surprised by the cover image attribution omission.) Is this not standard?
- alejohausner 2y agoDon’t read the book. Listen to it. I got a lot out of listening to a performance of the book, by Irish actors on RTE. It’s a lot more fun than reading the book. There’s a podcast for it: https://www.rte.ie/culture/2022/0610/1146705-listen-ulysses-james-joyce-podcast/ https://www.rte.ie/culture/2022/0610/1146705-listen-ulysses-...
- colechristensen 2y agoI have an audiobook read by an Irish narrator and while that's objectively great, the voice acting is top notch... a moderate to heavy Irish accent was rather extra unhelpful in the realm of any of it making sense for more than two minutes at a time.
- TechDebtDevin 2y agoThat's honestly sacrilege unless doing so for accessibility reasons.
- apetresc 2y agoI'm a huge fan of Standard Ebooks, but it's pretty funny that twice in both the subject line and in the body of the e-mail they sent out announcing this, they typo-ed "1,000th" as "1,00th", given their whole raison d'etre.