Standard Ebooks is an open source, volunteer-driven project to create and publish high-quality, fully featured and accessible

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

of works in the public domain. Standard Ebooks sources titles from places 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 libra ...

, the Internet Archive, and

Wikisource Wikisource is an online digital library of free-content textual sources on a wiki, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikisource is the name of the project as a whole and the name for each instance of that project (each instance usually re ...

, among others, 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 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 (formerly known as iBooks between January 2010 and September 2018) is an e-book reading and store application by Apple Inc. for its iOS and macOS operating systems and List of iOS devices, devices. It was announced, under the name i ...

. 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

Standard Ebooks produces e-books 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 people who are blind, and are useful to people who are visually impaired, illiterate, or hav ...

. 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 the work of transcription sites like Project Gutenberg, which

John Gruber John Gruber (born 1973) is a technology blogger, UI designer, and one of the inventors of the Markdown markup language. History Gruber is from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He received his Bachelor of Science in computer science from Drexel ...

of Daring Fireball described as "an amazing library," but whose books are "a mess typographically." All covers are derived from public domain fine art. Volunteer e-book producers locate paintings suitable for the work they are producing.

History

Standard Ebooks was founded by Alex Cabal after experiencing frustration at being unable to find well-formatted English-language e-books while living in Germany. After early experiments with 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'', the Standard Ebooks website was launched in 2017. Initial notice came from posts on

Hacker News Hacker News (sometimes abbreviated as 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 " ...

and Reddit, 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 fact ...

's newsletter. In 2021, Standard Ebooks launched the ability to accept donations and to be sponsored to produce specific books.

References

External links

* {{Official website , https://standardebooks.org/
Standard Ebooks
at GitHub Ebook suppliers Public domain Open access projects Electronic publishing New media