8 ms·

> I have very mixed feelings about Standard Ebooks[…] Why?

a2800276 5mo ago
It splits the community and number of possible volunteer hours for one. It also splits the canon into different versions. More projects fight for the attention attention (and possibly donations) of the audience. There are lots of reasons it could be preferable to centralize. OTOH their mission is limited and some competition is healthy, if only to explore alternative ways to do things.
- robin_reala 5mo ago
  It’s a different mission. PG focuses on an accurate digital translation of the source material, sometimes hosting multiple different versions of the same text, and doing things like putting work into recreating the adverts at the back of some novels. SE focuses less of preservation and more on making readers’ versions of the texts, like other publishing imprints. So there’s typography standardisation, a light-touch moderinisation of hyphenation and soundalike spelling, and things like author-wide collections of short fiction and poetry even if it didn’t previously exist. Both are valuable, but they serve different segments.
idoubtit 5mo ago
Not the GP, but I also have mixed feelings about Standard Ebooks. They modernise texts for American readers. This means changing the punctuation, merging some words, altering the syntax, etc. When I read an old novel, written two centuries ago in England, the little differences to modern English are part of the charm, and I certainly don't want any Americanism mixed in. For one of my favorite novels, The Forsyte saga, the author deliberately used some rare forms of words, which SE replaced with the mainstream forms.
- AdamN 5mo ago
  SE sounds truly, truly awful. Thanks for making me aware of its existence so I can avoid it.
  - phaedrix 5mo ago
    They're providing beautifully made ebooks for free... The only thing they are is truly, truly wonderful.
    - AdamN 5mo ago
      But why not be true to the original author's text? What's the need to modify it?
      - encrypted_bird 5mo ago
        Not parent, but while I can appreciate your viewpoint, I would like to point out that many many many books have abridged, reworded, simplified, or disambiguated versions for different audiences. The Bible is I daresay the most famous of these. Translations aside, even the English versions have had significant alterations done to wording, spelling, and meaning depending on the version. There's also the Great Illustrated Classics imprint for certain classic novels like H.G. Wells's The Invisible Man. (I read that one like 10 times as a kid and it's what got me into sci-fi as a whole I'd argue. Haha.) Whether these alternate versions are good or bad is obviously up for debate and depends on the person, but I'm just saying that what SE does is hardly new in the publishing world.
  - condwanaland 5mo ago
    SE is an amazing and wonderful resource
- jcurtis 5mo ago
  You may already be aware, but SE marks all commits making those kinds of changes as '[Editorial]', so it is generally trivial to use their tooling to build your own high-quality ebook without any of the editorial changes.
  - mrob 5mo ago
    When I tried this in the past, it was non-trivial because the editorial changes are mixed with the technical changes. Reverting the editorial changes broke the technical changes.
- acabal 5mo ago
  SE editor in chief here. What you describe is incorrect. The only thing we do is very light sound-alike spelling modernization, like "to-night" -> "tonight". We do not do things like change from en-GB to en-US, replace old words with different modern words, or change text for "American readers", whatever that means. I have no idea where you got that impression. I personally worked on the Forsyte saga. If you think something was done in error, please let us know and we'll be happy to fix it.
  - natex 5mo ago
    > The only thing we do is very light sound-alike spelling modernization, like "to-night" -> "tonight". Curious. Why even bother?
    - bell-cot 5mo ago
      Guess: screen readers and such.
  - tangledhelix 5mo ago
    One could argue that this falls into the previous poster's thought about "the little differences to modern English are part of the charm" ...
  - mrob 5mo ago
    I commented on this kind of editing several years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16957359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16957359 The edit is still in place, and I still maintain that changing 'phone to phone in dialogue changes the meaning.
    - jeltz 5mo ago
      Yeah, that edit clearly changes the meaning of the text.
svat 5mo ago
I was hoping to reply to this in detail but as I never got around to it, I'll keep it short: mostly it's about the editorial changes they make to the text, modernizing spelling etc. Many of the changes are unjustified IMO, and often detract from the charm of the original, and I'm uncomfortable reading a text I know has been tampered with in this way. Of course it's their project and they can do whatever they want, and they clearly love books, so with strong opinions there will be some that I may disagree with. I'd much rather read books from Project Gutenberg or Wikisource, both of which don't even correct obvious typos without marking up in some way that they've done so. I also have many positive things to say about Standard Ebooks, but I don't think you were asking about those. :) ---- Edit: Without going into what I think are the most egregious sort of changes they introduce (which I think will require a longer post) and limiting myself to ones easy to find immediately: See the earlier discussion (linked in a sibling comment here) where the editor-in-chief says it's ok to change punctuation because "The sounds out of his mouth do not include an apostrophe whether it's there in the spelling or not." (a very American view IMO): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16956931 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16956931 And looking at a recent commit on one of their books, here's a recent (https://github.com/standardebooks/agatha-christie_the-secret-of-chimneys/pull/4 https://github.com/standardebooks/agatha-christie_the-secret...) revert of one of their aggressive "modernizations" from 2024 (https://github.com/standardebooks/agatha-christie_the-secret-of-chimneys/commit/2a6fbb0f655136ee21c9275811f76f9922bdbe5b https://github.com/standardebooks/agatha-christie_the-secret...), that had, in line with their usual practice, changed "every one" to "everyone" (in one place even when referring to "a good many risks"), and the same commit made other changes (including one still present) like "they ought to have it lithographed. It must be a frightful nuisance doing every one separately." having the last four words turned into "doing everyone separately."!
- robin_reala 4mo ago
  On the “every one” example, that’s a definite mistake that shouldn’t have made its way in to the book in the first place. The production process has a specific step for “every one” (https://standardebooks.org/contribute/producing-an-ebook-step-by-step#modernize https://standardebooks.org/contribute/producing-an-ebook-ste...) that guides producers through making the correct choices when modern usage has two different possible choices. It shouldn’t have happened, but it’s a mistake that was fixed at least.

It splits the community and number of possible volunteer hours for one. It also splits the canon into different versions. More projects fight for the attention attention (and possibly donations) of the audience. There are lots of reasons it could be preferable to centralize. OTOH their mission is limited and some competition is healthy, if only to explore alternative ways to do things.

robin_reala 5mo ago
It’s a different mission. PG focuses on an accurate digital translation of the source material, sometimes hosting multiple different versions of the same text, and doing things like putting work into recreating the adverts at the back of some novels. SE focuses less of preservation and more on making readers’ versions of the texts, like other publishing imprints. So there’s typography standardisation, a light-touch moderinisation of hyphenation and soundalike spelling, and things like author-wide collections of short fiction and poetry even if it didn’t previously exist. Both are valuable, but they serve different segments.

idoubtit 5mo ago

Not the GP, but I also have mixed feelings about Standard Ebooks. They modernise texts for American readers. This means changing the punctuation, merging some words, altering the syntax, etc. When I read an old novel, written two centuries ago in England, the little differences to modern English are part of the charm, and I certainly don't want any Americanism mixed in. For one of my favorite novels, The Forsyte saga, the author deliberately used some rare forms of words, which SE replaced with the mainstream forms.

AdamN 5mo ago
SE sounds truly, truly awful. Thanks for making me aware of its existence so I can avoid it.
- phaedrix 5mo ago
  They're providing beautifully made ebooks for free... The only thing they are is truly, truly wonderful.
  - AdamN 5mo ago
    But why not be true to the original author's text? What's the need to modify it?
    - encrypted_bird 5mo ago
      Not parent, but while I can appreciate your viewpoint, I would like to point out that many many many books have abridged, reworded, simplified, or disambiguated versions for different audiences. The Bible is I daresay the most famous of these. Translations aside, even the English versions have had significant alterations done to wording, spelling, and meaning depending on the version. There's also the Great Illustrated Classics imprint for certain classic novels like H.G. Wells's The Invisible Man. (I read that one like 10 times as a kid and it's what got me into sci-fi as a whole I'd argue. Haha.) Whether these alternate versions are good or bad is obviously up for debate and depends on the person, but I'm just saying that what SE does is hardly new in the publishing world.
- condwanaland 5mo ago
  SE is an amazing and wonderful resource
jcurtis 5mo ago
You may already be aware, but SE marks all commits making those kinds of changes as '[Editorial]', so it is generally trivial to use their tooling to build your own high-quality ebook without any of the editorial changes.
- mrob 5mo ago
  When I tried this in the past, it was non-trivial because the editorial changes are mixed with the technical changes. Reverting the editorial changes broke the technical changes.
acabal 5mo ago
SE editor in chief here. What you describe is incorrect. The only thing we do is very light sound-alike spelling modernization, like "to-night" -> "tonight". We do not do things like change from en-GB to en-US, replace old words with different modern words, or change text for "American readers", whatever that means. I have no idea where you got that impression. I personally worked on the Forsyte saga. If you think something was done in error, please let us know and we'll be happy to fix it.
- natex 5mo ago
  > The only thing we do is very light sound-alike spelling modernization, like "to-night" -> "tonight". Curious. Why even bother?
  - bell-cot 5mo ago
    Guess: screen readers and such.
- tangledhelix 5mo ago
  One could argue that this falls into the previous poster's thought about "the little differences to modern English are part of the charm" ...
- mrob 5mo ago
  I commented on this kind of editing several years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16957359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16957359 The edit is still in place, and I still maintain that changing 'phone to phone in dialogue changes the meaning.
  - jeltz 5mo ago
    Yeah, that edit clearly changes the meaning of the text.

svat 5mo ago

I was hoping to reply to this in detail but as I never got around to it, I'll keep it short: mostly it's about the editorial changes they make to the text, modernizing spelling etc. Many of the changes are unjustified IMO, and often detract from the charm of the original, and I'm uncomfortable reading a text I know has been tampered with in this way. Of course it's their project and they can do whatever they want, and they clearly love books, so with strong opinions there will be some that I may disagree with. I'd much rather read books from Project Gutenberg or Wikisource, both of which don't even correct obvious typos without marking up in some way that they've done so. I also have many positive things to say about Standard Ebooks, but I don't think you were asking about those. :) ---- Edit: Without going into what I think are the most egregious sort of changes they introduce (which I think will require a longer post) and limiting myself to ones easy to find immediately: See the earlier discussion (linked in a sibling comment here) where the editor-in-chief says it's ok to change punctuation because "The sounds out of his mouth do not include an apostrophe whether it's there in the spelling or not." (a very American view IMO): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16956931 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16956931 And looking at a recent commit on one of their books, here's a recent (https://github.com/standardebooks/agatha-christie_the-secret-of-chimneys/pull/4 https://github.com/standardebooks/agatha-christie_the-secret...) revert of one of their aggressive "modernizations" from 2024 (https://github.com/standardebooks/agatha-christie_the-secret-of-chimneys/commit/2a6fbb0f655136ee21c9275811f76f9922bdbe5b https://github.com/standardebooks/agatha-christie_the-secret...), that had, in line with their usual practice, changed "every one" to "everyone" (in one place even when referring to "a good many risks"), and the same commit made other changes (including one still present) like "they ought to have it lithographed. It must be a frightful nuisance doing every one separately." having the last four words turned into "doing everyone separately."!

robin_reala 4mo ago
On the “every one” example, that’s a definite mistake that shouldn’t have made its way in to the book in the first place. The production process has a specific step for “every one” (https://standardebooks.org/contribute/producing-an-ebook-step-by-step#modernize https://standardebooks.org/contribute/producing-an-ebook-ste...) that guides producers through making the correct choices when modern usage has two different possible choices. It shouldn’t have happened, but it’s a mistake that was fixed at least.