Standard Ebooks is an

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

volunteer project to create and publish high-quality, fully featured, and accessible

ebooks An ebook (short for electronic book), also spelled as e-book or eBook, is a book publication made available in electronic form, consisting of text, images, or both, readable on the flat-panel display of computers or other electronic devices. A ...

of works in the

public domain The public domain (PD) consists of all the creative work to which no Exclusive exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly Waiver, waived, or may be inapplicable. Because no one holds ...

. The project sources existing ebooks from sites like

Project Gutenberg Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, as well as to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks." It was founded in 1971 by American writer Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital li ...

and the

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...

, modernizing and proofreading them to adhere to a unified

style guide A style guide is a set of standards for the writing, formatting, and design of documents. A book-length style guide is often called a style manual or a manual of style. A short style guide, typically ranging from several to several dozen page ...

. All Standard Ebooks titles are released in

epub EPUB is an e-book file format that uses the ".epub" file extension. The term is short for ''electronic publication'' and is sometimes stylized as ''ePUB''. EPUB is supported by many e-readers, and compatible software is available for most smart ...

, azw3, and Kepub formats, and are available through

Google Play Books Google Play Books, formerly Google eBooks, is an ebook digital distribution service operated by Google, part of its Google Play product line. Users can purchase and download ebooks and audiobooks from Google Play, which offers over five million ...

and

Apple Books Apple Books (known as iBooks prior to iOS 12 and macOS 10.14 Mojave) is an e-book reading and store application by Apple Inc. for its iOS, iPadOS and macOS operating systems and devices. It was announced, under the name iBooks, in conjunction ...

. 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. After early experiments creating a

pay what you want Pay what you want (or PWYW, also referred to as value-for-value model) is a pricing strategy where buyers pay their desired amount for a given commodity. This amount can sometimes include zero. A minimum (floor) price may be set, and/or a suggest ...

edition of ''

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' (also known as ''Alice in Wonderland'') is an 1865 English Children's literature, children's novel by Lewis Carroll, a mathematics university don, don at the University of Oxford. It details the story of a ...

'', the Standard Ebooks website was launched in 2017. Initial notice came from posts on

Hacker News Hacker News (HN) is a social news website focusing on computer science and entrepreneurship. It is run by the investment fund and startup incubator Y Combinator. In general, content that can be submitted is defined as "anything that gratifies one' ...

and

Reddit Reddit ( ) is an American Proprietary software, proprietary social news news aggregator, aggregation and Internet forum, forum Social media, social media platform. Registered users (commonly referred to as "redditors") submit content to the ...

, with later mentions including

Stack Overflow In software, a stack overflow occurs if the call stack pointer exceeds the stack bound. The call stack may consist of a limited amount of address space, often determined at the start of the program. The size of the call stack depends on many fa ...

's newsletter. In 2021, Standard Ebooks began accepting donations and sponsorships to produce specific books. In May 2024, Standard Ebooks published ''Ulysses'' as its thousandth title.

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". 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 A screen reader is a form of assistive technology (AT) that renders text and image content as speech or braille output. Screen readers are essential to blindness, blind people, and are useful to visually impaired people, Illiteracy, illiterate, ...

. 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". This approach stands in contrast to that of Project Gutenberg. All book covers are derived from public domain fine art. Volunteer ebook producers locate paintings suitable for the work they are producing.

List of Ebooks available on Standard Ebooks

Following is a list of ebooks available on Standard Ebooks.

References

External links

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Standard Ebooks
at

GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...

{{Ebooks Ebook suppliers Public domain Open access projects Electronic publishing New media