I’m a contributor – I did Kafka’s The Castle, Agatha Christie’s Giant’s Bread, and Stella Benson’s The Faraway Bride for this launch – and I’m happy to answer any questions about Standard Ebooks.
Do you think the things that makes an edition special goes missing while converting to e.g. Standard Ebooks. I remember both the The Castle and Das Schloss like they had typesetting that helped me in perceiving the feel of the book. Is there anyway to preserve that feeling and still keep within the bounds of standardisation you adhere to? (I did a quick look through my copy and it does not seem to be much that makes it unique really, just the size of the book, and the chapter heading graphics..)
Do you know if the project try to look at other languages at all?
Nothing particularly in The Castle, from my production of it. As this was not previously PD there wasn’t any Gutenberg (or other) transcription available, so I did my own from the OCR of the original scans. A large part of the feel of the work, to me at least, comes from the extreme sentence / paragraph lengths though.
We do have a default typography across all our works (the “Standard” in “Standard Ebooks” refers to a standard imprint; think Penguin) but we usually retain specific famous things where possible in a reflowable format. For example, the Mouse’s Tail in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,[1] or the letter in E. A. Poe’s “Thou Art the Man”.[2]
We don’t take on other languages, no. Our tooling[3] and style guides[4] are tailored specifically to English. Absolutely nothing stopping another project from forking the codebase (it’s GPL-3) and giving it a go.
Probably a dumb question, but how do you guys decide (and source) the book covers? I love how they look, but as a philistine can't put into words why.
Also thanks for doing this, I've read a bunch of stuff (GK Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, Dashiell Hammett) that I wouldn't have otherwise if it weren't for this service.
The historical criteria is fine-art style oil painting. These days we’re starting to use first-edition cover art a bunch for more modern productions if it’s good quality. We also tend to use abstract oil paintings for sci-fi.[1] Obviously, all art is sourced from the public domain too. We’ve also started a database of confirmed-US-PD artwork that we can use for future productions.[2]
I don't know their reasons but PDF is a rather problematic format so I suspect that's why.
You can run their EPUB through Pandoc to convert yourself, or put some effort in and setup your own Calibre instance which will do something similar when you ask it to.
I have a hypothesis that we're getting closer to a cultural inflection point (maybe half a decade out). With every year, more important and very high-quality cultural artifacts enter the public domain, while at the same time, many low quality artefacts are produced (... AI slop). It'll be increasingly difficult to choose a good cultural artefict for consumption (e.g., which book to read next or which movie to watch). A very good indicator for quality is time and thus a useful filter.
In some years we could have the following: a netflix-like (legal variant of popcorntime) software system (p2p) that serves high-quality public domain movies, for those who like it, even with AI upscaling or post processing.
The same would also work for books, with this pipeline: Project Gutenberg -> Standard Ebooks. At the inflection point, there would be a steady stream of high-quality formats of high-quality content, enough to satisfy the demand of cultural consumption. You wouldn't need the latest book/movie anymore, except for interest in contemporary stuff.
Do you know if the project try to look at other languages at all?
We do have a default typography across all our works (the “Standard” in “Standard Ebooks” refers to a standard imprint; think Penguin) but we usually retain specific famous things where possible in a reflowable format. For example, the Mouse’s Tail in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,[1] or the letter in E. A. Poe’s “Thou Art the Man”.[2]
We don’t take on other languages, no. Our tooling[3] and style guides[4] are tailored specifically to English. Absolutely nothing stopping another project from forking the codebase (it’s GPL-3) and giving it a go.
[1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/lewis-carroll/alices-adven...
[2] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/edgar-allan-poe/short-fict...
[3] https://github.com/standardebooks/tools
[4] https://standardebooks.org/manual/
Also thanks for doing this, I've read a bunch of stuff (GK Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, Dashiell Hammett) that I wouldn't have otherwise if it weren't for this service.
[1] https://standardebooks.org/subjects/science-fiction
[2] https://standardebooks.org/artworks
One of the SE editors experimented with turning SE ebooks into PDFs, though. See more about that here: https://groups.google.com/g/standardebooks/c/Xy2bwiexLeM/m/f...
You can run their EPUB through Pandoc to convert yourself, or put some effort in and setup your own Calibre instance which will do something similar when you ask it to.
I have a hypothesis that we're getting closer to a cultural inflection point (maybe half a decade out). With every year, more important and very high-quality cultural artifacts enter the public domain, while at the same time, many low quality artefacts are produced (... AI slop). It'll be increasingly difficult to choose a good cultural artefict for consumption (e.g., which book to read next or which movie to watch). A very good indicator for quality is time and thus a useful filter.
In some years we could have the following: a netflix-like (legal variant of popcorntime) software system (p2p) that serves high-quality public domain movies, for those who like it, even with AI upscaling or post processing.
The same would also work for books, with this pipeline: Project Gutenberg -> Standard Ebooks. At the inflection point, there would be a steady stream of high-quality formats of high-quality content, enough to satisfy the demand of cultural consumption. You wouldn't need the latest book/movie anymore, except for interest in contemporary stuff.
Was referring to the Bogart version.