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Standard Ebooks: liberated ebooks, carefully produced for the true book lover
- smallnix 2y agoAwesome project. Gutenberg is mentioned, does this project feed back to Gutenberg?
- aegypti 2y agoAbsolutely, from a previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32217313 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32217313
- miles 2y agoAs the linked comment says, it's up to the individual contributor to inform PG of any corrections; SE does not do so as a matter of course (at least, that was the case when I last contributed).
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- opto 2y agoLooks like a great project, and one sorely needed by people like me who find themselves trying to get hold of old books they can't get in their local library and that are too expensive to buy secondhand.
- carlosjobim 2y agoThe shadow libraries such as Anna's Archive are a treasure trove of old books, and you're not breaking any imaginary law by downloading old books which are out of copyright.
- zozbot234 2y agoIf a book is out of copyright you can usually find the scan on Internet Archive. No need to look elsewhere at all.
- ZeroGravitas 2y agoThe internet archive's open library will also link to Standard Ebooks (and Gutenberg and a few others) if a version exists of a book you are looking at e.g.: https://openlibrary.org/books/OL37044523M/The_Woodlanders https://openlibrary.org/books/OL37044523M/The_Woodlanders
- notpushkin 2y agoIf a book is still in copyright, chances are you’ll find it there as well. Scans suck though, even a badly OCR’ed EPUB is way better.
- charcircuit 2y agoThe scans can have a different copyright date than the book itself.
- eesmith 2y agoThere is no copyright on scans. Scanning is not transformative and does not result in a derivative work which can is protected by copyright law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Scanning_an_image_does_not_make_it_your_%22own_work%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Scanning_an_image_do... https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/1214/who-owns-a-copyright-on-a-scanned-work https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/1214/who-owns-a-copy... points us to read the Compendium of US Copyright Office Practices at https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/docs/compendium.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/docs/compendium.pdf > 313.4(A) Mere Copies > A work that is a mere copy of another work of authorship is not copyrightable. The Office cannot register a work that has been merely copied from another work of authorship without any additional original authorship. See L. Batlin & Son, 536 F.2d at 490 (“one who has slavishly or mechanically copied from others may not claim to be an author”); Bridgeman Art Library, Ltd. v. Corel Corp., 36 F. Supp. 2d 191, 195 (S.D.N.Y. 1999) (“exact photographic copies of public domain works of art would not be copyrightable under United States law because they are not original”).
- charcircuit 2y agoA pdf file can contain more than just the raw images of the pages.
- eesmith 2y agoCertainly! If you add my latest Kirk/Spock slash fanfic to the end of the text, then that is transformative, so the resulting PDF is covered under copyright. But you wrote "scan". Adding an OCR'ed text layer, or doing manual proofreading and layout ("sweat of the brow") is not sufficiently transformative to have copyright protection. And we were specifically talking about scans of old books stored in shadow libraries.
- mariusor 2y agoAs far as I know Standard gets their raw ebooks from Project Gutenberg which has a vastly greater collection of public domain works. What they're doing is typesetting them for the average reader. But if all you're looking for is just the content, Gutenberg is the place to look for ethically clean copies.
- HexPhantom 2y agoTracking down older or out-of-print books can be weirdly frustrating, especially when prices for secondhand copies get absurd
- LordGronk 2y agoI would love this if it were to produce viable unabridged ebooks of Francis Parkman’s “France and England in North America” vol 2-7. All the existent digital editions were poorly scanned and don’t separate footnotes from the main text.
- poidos 2y agoIf you have the cash, you can pay them to do so! Scroll down to “SPONSOR A NEW EBOOK”: https://standardebooks.org/donate https://standardebooks.org/donate > Sponsoring a new ebook of your choice calls for a donation of $900 + $0.02 per word over the first 100,000
- squigz 2y agoI love this project and don't want to disparage the work that goes into it, but 900 USD, and it has to be a book that is already transcribed online? That seems a bit much to me.
- eesmith 2y agoThat sounds quite reasonable to me. That's about what a freelance proofreader charges to edit a book, if https://thewritelife.com/how-much-to-pay-for-a-book-editor/ https://thewritelife.com/how-much-to-pay-for-a-book-editor/ is correct, and that's working with a (likely Word) document which isn't poorly scanned from paper.
- hombre_fatal 2y agoYou’re paying a human to remaster the book word for word and hand transform it into epub html paragraph by paragraph. How much less would you do it for?
- carlosjobim 2y agoIf you pooled the funds with 10 other people who want the book, it would be $90 each. Or imagine pooling it with 100 people.
- acabal 2y ago
- tailspin2019 2y agoI love this. They pay attention to everything I normally despise about (many) ebooks (poor layout, lack of metadata, no chapter headings etc).
- jimnotgym 2y agoIs there anything similar for Audiobooks (which I wish would go back to being called Talking Books)
- kybernetikos 2y agoLibrivox https://librivox.org/ https://librivox.org/ is the closest I know.
- cdrini 2y agoI would also recommend using Microsoft Edge's built-in ReadAloud (TTS) on standard ebooks. They have a mind boggling number of hyper realistic voices; more than any other browser I've tested.
- mentalgear 2y agoBeautifully made! Which gutenberg.org would be updated with this design & approach!
- ssttoo 2y agoI recently started on my first title contribution to the project, it’s a rewarding experience https://github.com/stoyan/edith-wharton_the-custom-of-the-country/commits/master/ https://github.com/stoyan/edith-wharton_the-custom-of-the-co... It’s HTML all the way down The step-by-step: https://standardebooks.org/contribute/producing-an-ebook-step-by-step https://standardebooks.org/contribute/producing-an-ebook-ste... In a nutshell: start with a Project Gutenberg text, clean it up to a high standard, have it peer reviewed and published
- Touche 2y agoLove this. So many in the archivist community are only interested in preservation and don't care at all about making the material accessible. Love to see a project like this prioritizing the latter.
- stog 2y agoYou’re spot on with this. I recently converted a local history book from 1911 to Markdown, ePub and HTML and tracked the changes on GitHub. Only a handful of copies of this book exist in physical form and it has been photo copied (which is great). However, I was completely shot down by the local library when I was discussing it with them. They said they already had a photo copy and didn’t need anymore digital editions, I tried to explain the benefits of having it in a machine readable format but they wouldn’t entertain it. I completed the project for me, so I wasn’t too bothered, but thought they might have been interested in archiving it but they weren’t. My general feeling is that they didn’t like an outsider contributing and touching on a format they didn’t know so got slightly defensive.
- simpaticoder 2y agoInteresting. I wonder if libraries suffer a supply-chain risk and so avoid taking contributions from (non-vetted) individuals? I imagine that over time a library gets lots of offers to take "important works of literature" from cranks, and perhaps they've developed this culture to protect them from that. Pure speculation, of course.
- miles 2y agoSome of the higher ranking previous discussions: 2017, 441 points, 97 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14570035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14570035 2019, 820 points, 131 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20594802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20594802 2022, 1578 points, 256 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32215324 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32215324 2024, 701 points, 154 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38831219 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38831219
- kpjas 2y agoHow about https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Main_Page https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Main_Page ?
- grues-dinner 2y agoIt's not very obvious, but Wikisource provides EPUBs via the Tools menu for every book.
- BoingBoomTschak 2y agoWhat a great project! This should really be funded by states, states which often already have some money dedicated to the preservation of culture. Too bad most stuff I really like will never enter the public domain in my lifetime... well, paper and the high seas still exist!
- contact9879 2y agoits never too late to expand your "stuff I really like" further into the public domain! there are whole generations of wonderful and insightful works that essentially disappeared from present consciousness for no reason other than for being old
- thfuran 2y agoIt would be better to expand the public domain. Whole generations of works were stolen by extensions of copyright.
- contact9879 2y agowhile I don't disagree, ¿por que no los dos?
- Sverigevader 2y agoIt's thanks to this site that I learned that Kobo uses a really bad renderer for epubs unless converted to their own ebook format (Kepub). It make a huge difference in appearance and performance on a Kobo device. https://standardebooks.org/help/how-to-use-our-ebooks#kobo-faq https://standardebooks.org/help/how-to-use-our-ebooks#kobo-f...
- RVuRnvbM2e 2y agoWow I never knew this!
- robin_reala 2y agoYeah, if you just load normal epubs it defaults to an old version of Adobe Digital Editions unfortunately.
- wyclif 2y agoYes, though I understand Kobo is working on correcting these issues with the epub format.
- crashingintoyou 2y agoAre they? Where have you heard that? Recently Calibre was updated to convert things to kepub when loading to Kobo devices - see https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/03/calibre-update-convert-kobo-kepub-files https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/03/calibre-update-convert-k... - but I haven't anything about Kobo itself doing anything to improve this.
- crtasm 2y agoI assume KOReader has a better renderer for epub but will have to test how it compares to the stock software+kepub. So far I've only used KOReader on my device.
- contact9879 2y ago
- coopykins 2y agoI found curious that if you order the books by reading difficulty (easier to harder) The sound and the fury is on the second place.
- acabal 2y agoWe use the Flesch-Kincaid algorithm to calculate reading ease. For most books it works pretty well, but for avant-garde prose like The Sound and the Fury it fails pretty badly. It also considers Ulysses to be "fairly easy"!
- acabal 2y agoEditor-in-chief here, happy to answer any questions, as always. We also recently celebrated Public Domain Day with an especially notable crop of books, including The Sound and the Fury, All Quiet on the Western Front, John Steinbeck's first novel, some Hemingway, Gandhi, two Dashiell Hammett novels, and more: https://standardebooks.org/blog/public-domain-day-2025 https://standardebooks.org/blog/public-domain-day-2025
- Erlangen 2y agoHi, Alex. Is there anyway to browser the ebooks filtered by languages? I tried to find some texts in French, but it doesn't seem to have any.
- LtWorf 2y agoSame for me. I think it's english only.
- acabal 2y agoStandard Ebooks only works on English-language books, as typography varies between languages and we're only experts in English.
- philistine 2y agoI can tell you there is a lot of appetite for other languages. I looked at the project and the amount of stuff that would need to be rewritten to work with multiple languages was daunting. I would consider working on making your documentation and workflow functional with multiple languages.
- acabal 2y agoLots of people have tried similar projects in other languages but as far as I know none have persevered. Personally I think it's important to have one person in charge who is able to approve of the quality of all the project's output; for now, at SE, that person is me and I'm only an expert in English.
- virtualritz 2y agoThat website is hopefully not an indication of how these ebooks will look on my mobile. A screenshot from the typography section: https://ibb.co/nqhyTR3M https://ibb.co/nqhyTR3M
- contact9879 2y agoif you're reading a style manual it might :) but no, the manual itself is not really mobile-friendly. you can check what an actual ebook would look like though: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/louis-couperus/the-tour/alexander-teixeira-de-mattos/text/single-page https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/louis-couperus/the-tour/al...
- virtualritz 2y agoMuch too tight leading for a book text. This is a leading you'd see on the ingredients list of an energy bar packaging. The other choices are fine. Caveat: I studied typography and worked in that field for a decade.
- contact9879 2y agothe online view is not the primary way readers are expected to read the ebooks. downloading the epub and reading on an ereader (edit: where line height and font size are customizable) is the expected and best supported method however, contributions are very welcome and everything is hosted on GitHub if you'd like to suggest improvements; or send your thoughts on the mailing list
- SamBam 2y agoBut if they have an online view, why not make it readable? The suggestion above about the line height is presumably a 1-line CSS change.
- contact9879 2y agopresumably, which is why i encouraged submitting a note to the mailing list or the standardebooks/web repo on github
- Animats 2y agoMost of the big print-on-demand companies will now make hardcovers, for about $10. You can't feed raw Gutenberg files into those mills, but these "standard ebooks" have enough formatting info for that. So that would be a useful service.
- m-hodges 2y agoWhat are some examples of companies that do this?
- pmarreck 2y agoIt surprises me that the eBook (clarification: epub) format is basically XHTML because 1) that means that every eReader needs to basically be a web browser 2) this sounds like it would make reformatting for different devices NOT easier
- contact9879 2y agothis also somewhat surprised me at first but I think it's obvious in hindsight, though they don't have to be a full-blown web browser (you can go read the epub specs at W3C to see what's supported) as for (2) I'm not sure why you think it would make it less easier? being html, text reflows automatically based on screen size, font size, line height, etc
- pmarreck 2y agoI guess I assumed that, for example, multi device support on websites for various device widths entails a bunch of CSS, which means the epub renderer would have to also do that, which basically means a whole web browser. also that things like footnotes or anything that has a floating reference (table of contents links for example) might get very complex or require javascript
- contact9879 2y agosince ebooks are primarily (only?) text you don't have to worry about UI elements and such which simplifies a lot of the css footnotes aren't really a thing with ebooks (at least as far as displaying the note on the page with the text). Because it is just a html renderer, footnotes are presented as mutual <a> elements located in the endnotes at the end of the book
- badsectoracula 2y agoYeah (i guess you mean epub), though in practice readers support only a tiny subset and epubs avoid using anything fancier than basic XHTML. Epubs that try to use fancy stuff (like most CSS outside of setting fonts - that readers can ignore either because they do not support it, or because the user wants to use another font) tend to not display correctly.
- sandreas 2y agoWhat I'm missing in modern ebooks (like epub format) is more metadata. Who's talking (character data)? What emotional aspects does the scene have (angry, happy, sad, in a hurry)? Where does the conversation take place (geodata)? I'd love to see at least: - character: ID, Name, Gender, Age - mood: ID, Name (Happy, Sad, Angry, ...) - place: ID, Name, Acoustic (Outside, Inside, Cave, ...) This could be prepared by the author, work as a glossary, enrich the whole ebook experience and also would be a great preparation to teach AI voices how to convert a book into an audiobook.
- acabal 2y agoTEI is something like that, but the amount of effort required to mark a book up like that would be astronomical.
- xondono 2y agoStarts to sound like the kind of task an AI could do reasonably well though
- kec 2y agoIf the goal of these tags are metadata for AI consumption, and the solution to generate them is “use an AI”… what is the point?
- roskelld 2y agoSpecialization I presume, so one produces the metadata that can be consumed by another. Also, the thing from the above post that stood out to me would be to act as a reminder for the reader. Not so much the location and emotion, but the character data. I've often found myself wondering who the character is that's appeared in a scene, forgetting that they previously appeared earlier.
- hombre_fatal 2y agoIf it can be derived from the book text, then LLMs or reader can already derive it. If it can’t be derived from the book text, then it’s extra content that probably shouldn’t be there because it came from elsewhere.
- llm_nerd 2y agoA good initiative, but the "us vs them" framing — where the "them" are other people trying to do a service for people — gives off bad juju. It positions the value proposition by seemingly denigrating other providers of free ebooks. It begins with "Other free ebooks don’t put much effort into..." which sounds extremely catty. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but it seems there's a way to stand on other people's shoulders and celebrate each other.
- zestyping 2y agoAgreed.
- kseistrup 2y agoI love Standard Ebooks. See also Global Grey ebooks: https://www.globalgreyebooks.com/ https://www.globalgreyebooks.com/ One woman has formatted hundreds of ebooks herself.
- konstantinua00 2y agoForbidden You don't have permission to access this resource. thanks for being open ...I guess
- generationP 2y agoYou're probably in some country that has longer copyright duration than the US (life+70a, which is atrocious enough). Use Tor or a proxy.
- SamBam 2y agoAre there any non-English books? When I go to the search page, language isn't even a pull-down option, so I'm guessing not. There is a huge world of out-of-copyright non-English texts, and Project Gutenberg has many thousands of them. I wonder if any interest could be generated to help bring them in by posting on foreign language subreddits or something.
- slevis 2y agoJust looked through the entire website to answer this question. Seems like they only accept english books :( "Types of ebooks we don’t accept: - Non-English-language books. Translations to English are, of course, OK." (https://standardebooks.org/contribute/collections-policy https://standardebooks.org/contribute/collections-policy)
- SamBam 2y agoWeird. Why the explicit rule against them? I understand if the existing editors can't personally proofread the submissions, but that's why peer-review exists. Or an open-source project in general where people can post corrections. Jimbo Wales didn't need to speak a hundred languages to launch Wikipedia.
- contact9879 2y agoTo me, that niche is already covered by Wikisource. Standard Ebooks as a project is very strict about conforming to its editorial and quality standards. On boarding more languages would require volunteer editorial experts in those languages. Besides, projects in other languages can absolutely build upon Standard Ebooks work, but to expect Standard Ebooks itself to support other languages is just too outside the scope and expertise of the volunteers available.
- kelvinjps10 2y agoIf you were to find the expert editors for the other languages would you let them publish the works in those other languages on standards books website?
- amelius 2y agoDo they use AI tools in their conversion workflow?
- contact9879 2y agoNo, LLMs are not used (nor would they be allowed). As for whether you would consider OCR to be AI, then... possibly?
- UncleEntity 2y agoDoes it use any automation? My bro-in-law supported his family as a freelance editor for years while my sister was doing the "maternity leave" thing so I know there's a non-trivial amount of work that goes into book editing. Cutting out some of that human labor seems like a good thing for a volunteer project.
- contact9879 2y agothere is quite a lot of automated changes using standard ebooks open source tools package the vast majority of textual tooling is regex-galore, but there is also automated epub tooling in there too
- kelvinjps10 2y agoSorry for the question but how behind are the LLMs in terms of quality for something like this?
- contact9879 2y agoI can't really answer that because I haven't actually tried to use an LLM on any part of the process. The vast majority of the process is semantic markup using (x)html and proofreading. The markup process could, I guess, use an LLM, but most of it is already automated using regex and linting.
- tcoff91 2y agoFor those who are into ebooks and audiobooks, I’ve been having a blast with the app Storyteller: https://storyteller-platform.gitlab.io/storyteller/ https://storyteller-platform.gitlab.io/storyteller/ You can self host the server, and it will create epub3s with the audiobook and ebook synced up. Then you use the mobile app to listen and read the books. It works way better than whispersync from kindle. Read on your boox e reader then switch to your phone and listen and everything syncs up seamlessly.
- tass 2y agoWhere do you find the books to host? Also your link has an erroneous .com
- tcoff91 2y agoYou can get drm free audiobooks from libro and you can strip drm from kindle and audible books with calibre and libation.
- pidgeon_lover 2y agoAt first glance, the favicon/logo looks like the poop emoji, rather than a bonfire haha
- rr808 2y agoI like the idea. I read a bunch of classics from Gutenberg. In reality so many old books are very long and boring I ended up getting more modern books from the library instead. Maybe TikTok ruined me but maybe these things really do literally have a shelf life. Hopefully reformatting will help. Perhaps a better way to review and find the gems would be most helpful..
- TomasBM 2y agoPerhaps it's not just about the 'shelf life' of a book, but also the language and style they use. The more archaic the language, and the more distant the style that the author's use, the harder it is for me to focus on the book. Perhaps it would be useful to have expertly abridged and modernized versions of (e)books, with interpreter's notes for each change.
- zozbot234 2y ago> Perhaps it would be useful to have expertly abridged and modernized versions of (e)books, with interpreter's notes for each change. A good AI can do this for you nowadays. So if anything it's nice to have the original version available.
- dr_dshiv 2y agoDid you ever consider making them public domain but still offering to charge optional $10 donation for download? I’m interested in a similar approach for a rare book library, but funding for staff is a really challenge so we want to make some kind of revenue stream.
- contact9879 2y agoStandard Ebooks grew out of a pay-what-you-want experiment that Alex did ~10 years ago
- MilnerRoute 2y agoAnother great ebook/volunteer project is Librivox - free public-domain audiobooks read by volunteers around the world... https://librivox.org/ https://librivox.org/
- tcoff91 2y agoYou can pair these together with the Storyteller app to create an epub3 with the audio embedded and aligned to have a whispersync-esque experience
- reassess_blind 2y agoA sort by popularity filter would be appreciated.
- jomohke 2y agoSome places resist this because it causes a "rich get richer" effect in popularity. But it's admittedly convenient.
- fuddle 2y agoIt would be great to be able to sort by popularity, to make it easier to find popular books. Or have a list of top 100 downloads.
- dalanmiller 2y agoI love Standard Ebooks! It is such a treasure! Currently enjoying Cup of Gold by John Steinbeck. Thank you to everyone who helps put this together!
- fernly 2y agoA bit of context regarding Project Gutenberg. Its intake process is far from casual. Take a look at Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders (PGDP, [0],[1]), one of the oldest "crowd-sourcing" projects on the net (est. 2000). As you can see from [0], every book goes through three rounds of proofing, where volunteers read each page of text and compare it to the scanned image; then through two rounds of format review, where other volunteers insert or review format markup. From that 5-pass process the marked-up text is handed to a volunteer "post-processor" who assembles the final HTML or e-book file; then the completed book gets one more "smooth reading" pass before it is posted to PG. This it the process that produces the books input to Standard Ebooks. That they can still find scanner errors ("tne" for "the", a typical "scanno") demonstrates how difficult it is to see those. But their presence isn't from carelessness or disregard for the value of the books. In the 20-teens I put in hundreds of volunteer hours at PGDP in all the above roles, and it was very satisfying work. I'd recommend it to anyone wanting an online hobby that feels constructive. Volunteering time to Standard Ebooks would probably feel good as well. [0] https://www.pgdp.net/c/activity_hub.php https://www.pgdp.net/c/activity_hub.php [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Proofreaders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Proofreaders
- contact9879 2y agoThe work done by Distributed Proofreaders is pretty amazing. I try to contribute my 35 pages as often as I can. The backlog there is pretty insane even while finishing upwards of 150 ebooks per month it truly is an "online hobby that feels constructive". you get these tiny glimpses into our shared literary/cultural history while knowing that the work you're doing is for the benefit of all (benefit of the public domain)
- zozbot234 2y ago> The backlog there is pretty insane even while finishing upwards of 150 ebooks per month Isn't the backlog there mostly in the post-processing step, though? To the point where they're taking finished texts and running them again through the page-by-page proofreading in hope of fishing out more OCR typos and improving the format markup? You can also contribute at Wikisource if you prefer, that doesn't really have a post-processing step and has much less of a fixed pipeline. (There are explicit "proofreading" and "verification" steps per page, but not much beyond that.)
- thangalin 2y agohttps://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/04/11/project-gutenberg-projects/ https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/04/11/project-gutenberg-p... > Of all these projects, the most amenable to automatic typesetting are those produced by Standard Ebooks and HTML Writers Guild. The benefit of using HTML Writers Guild is their semantic markup and simple document type definition (DTD) file. Standard Ebooks, as the name suggests, are brilliantly standardized and have an excellent Manual of Style that describes what to expect from the XHTML.
- neves 2y agoI really miss some kind of organization. I can't find a most downloaded page, or even some recommendations lists.
- HexPhantom 2y agoLove that they're using Git and keeping everything open. It's rare to see such a thoughtful blend of literary love and modern tooling
- macmac 2y agoDoes anyone know why the beautiful covers disappear when I import these books in standard format into Calibre?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- zestyping 2y agoFor a project that crows so loudly about its typographic prowess, the home page offers a comically terrible reading experience. https://imgur.com/a/7uPhyTd https://imgur.com/a/7uPhyTd Huge, wildly irregular word gaps, awkward hyphenation, stacked hyphen breaks. I suspect most of this could be improved simply by letting go of the slavish attachment to full justification and expanding the column to a more reasonable width by reducing the font size and margins.