Online digital book library
Standard Ebooks
is an
open source
, volunteer-driven project to create and publish high-quality, fully featured, and accessible
e-books
of works in the
public domain
.
[1]
[2]
Standard Ebooks sources titles from places like
Project Gutenberg
, the
Internet Archive
, and
Wikisource
, among others,
[3]
but differs from those projects in that the goal is to maximize readability for a modern audience, take advantage of accessibility features available in modern e-book file formats, and to streamline updates to the e-books (such as typo fixes) by making use of
GitHub
as a collaboration tool.
All Standard Ebooks titles are released in
epub
,
azw3
, and
Kepub
formats, and are available through
Google Play Books
and
Apple Books
. All of the project's e-book files are released in the United States public domain, and all code is released under the
GNU General Public License v3
.
Style
[
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]
Standard Ebooks produces e-books by following a unified style guide, which specifies everything from typography standards to semantic tagging and internal code structure, with the goal of creating a consistent corpus, aligned with modern publishing standards and "cleaned of ancient and irrelevant ephemera
[
example needed
]
."
[4]
Standard Ebooks works with organizations such as the National Network for Equitable Library Service, and strives to conform to
DAISY Consortium accessibility standards
, among others, to ensure that all productions will work with modern tools such as
screen readers
.
With the goal of making public domain works more accessible to modern audiences, archaic spellings are modernized and typographic quirks are addressed "so ebooks look like books and not text documents."
[3]
This approach stands in contrast to the work of transcription sites like
Project Gutenberg
.
[5]
All book covers are derived from public domain fine art. Volunteer e-book producers locate paintings suitable for the work they are producing.
Samples of Standard Ebook covers
History
[
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]
Standard Ebooks was founded by Alex Cabal after he experienced frustration at being unable to find well-formatted English-language e-books while living in Germany.
[6]
After early experiments creating a
pay what you want
edition of
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
,
[7]
the Standard Ebooks website was launched in 2017. Initial notice came from posts on
Hacker News
and
Reddit
,
[6]
with later mentions including
Stack Overflow
's newsletter.
[8]
In 2021, Standard Ebooks began accepting donations and sponsorships to produce specific books.
[9]
References
[
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]
External links
[
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]