Standard Ebooks

From HandWiki
Short description: Online digital book library
Standard Ebooks
Logo
Established2015; 11 years ago (2015)
LocationUnited States
Collection
Size1,398 books (1 March 2026)
Websitestandardebooks.org

Standard Ebooks is an open source, volunteer-driven project to create and publish high-quality, fully featured, and accessible ebooks of works in the public domain.[1][2] The project sources existing ebooks from sites like Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive, modernizing and proofreading them to adhere to a unified style guide.[1][3][4][5]

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 ebook files are released in the United States public domain, and all code is released under the GNU General Public License v3.

History

Standard Ebooks was founded by Alex Cabal after he experienced frustration at being unable to find well-formatted English-language ebooks 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,[8] with later mentions including Stack Overflow's newsletter.[9]

In 2021, Standard Ebooks began accepting donations and sponsorships to produce specific books.[10] In May 2024, Standard Ebooks published Ulysses as its thousandth title.[11]

Style

Standard Ebooks produces ebooks 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".[12] 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 that of Project Gutenberg.[13]

All book covers are derived from public domain fine art. Volunteer ebook producers locate paintings suitable for the work they are producing.[citation needed]

Samples of Standard Ebook covers
  • The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
    Cover of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
  • Little Women
    Cover of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
  • Moby Dick
    Cover of Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 "Free eBooks with Modern Typography & Nice Formatting, All "Carefully Produced for the True Book Lover"". Open Culture. 21 June 2017. http://www.openculture.com/2017/06/free-ebooks-with-modern-typography-nice-formatting-all-carefully-produced-for-the-true-book-lover.html. 
  2. ↑ Pot, Justin (23 Apr 2018). "Standard Ebooks Offers Public Domain Downloads That Aren't Ugly". https://www.howtogeek.com/fyi/standard-ebooks-offers-public-domain-downloads-that-arent-ugly/. 
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Austin, Patrick Lucas (20 June 2017). "Standard eBooks Is a Gutenberg Project You'll Actually Use". https://lifehacker.com/standard-ebooks-is-a-gutenberg-project-you-ll-actually-1796273390. 
  4. ↑ Centers, Josh (2021-05-10). "Standard Ebooks Makes Classic Texts Beautiful" (in en). https://tidbits.com/2021/05/10/standard-ebooks-makes-classic-texts-beautiful/. 
  5. ↑ Patkar, Mihir (2020-11-28). "6 Little Known Places to Download Unique Free Ebooks" (in en). https://www.makeuseof.com/little-known-places-to-download-free-ebooks/. 
  6. ↑ Ferraioli, Julia (2023-01-26). "Alex Cabal and the Standard Ebooks "saga"" (in en-us). https://www.opensourcestories.org/stories/2023/alex-cabal/. 
  7. ↑ "The results from our pay-what-you-want ebook pricing experiment are in – Alex Cabal". 2014-04-07. https://alexcabal.com/the-results-from-our-pay-what-you-want-ebook-pricing-experiment-are-in/. 
  8. ↑ pressmaster (2021-02-19). "Alex Cabal: Standard Ebooks" (in en-US). https://mythaxis.com/2021/02/19/alex-cabal-standard-ebooks/. 
  9. ↑ Donovan, Ryan; Williams, Cassidy (2022-08-12). "The Overflow #138: Social learning for engineers" (in en-US). https://stackoverflow.blog/2022/08/12/the-overflow-138-social-learning-for-engineers/. 
  10. ↑ "Donate" (in en-US). https://standardebooks.org/donate. 
  11. ↑ "Standard Ebooks' 1,000th title: Ulysses | Hacker News". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40535895. 
  12. ↑ Kozlowski, Michael (2020-06-25). "Standard Ebooks is a great place to download free content" (in en-US). https://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/standard-ebooks-is-a-great-place-to-download-free-content. 
  13. ↑ Ghoshal, Abhimanyu (21 June 2017). "Fill up your ebook reader with beautifully formatted free classics". https://thenextweb.com/shareables/2017/06/21/fill-ebook-reader-beautifully-formatted-free-classics/. 



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