Standard Ebooks
Standard Ebooks is a not-for-profit platform that curates, refines, and republishes existing copies of freely available public domain e-books no longer protected by U.S. copyright law.[1][2] Its code is open source and is available for contribution from volunteers.[3] Standard Ebooks sources its titles from Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive.[4]
Cover of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, created by Standard Ebooks volunteers using public domain artwork | |
Established | 2015 |
---|---|
Location | United States |
Collection | |
Size | Over 370 documents (June 2020) |
Website | standardebooks.org |
All Standard Ebooks titles are released in epub, azw3, Kepub and epub3 formats. All of the project's book files are released in the public domain, and all code is released under the GNU General Public License v3.
Style
The project creates books using a style guide which the project calls The Standard Ebooks Manual of Style. It provides a guide for volunteers to edit and produce e-books that comply with the project's standards. Their finished product is designed to take advantage of modern e-reader technology, and utilize modern and consistent typography. This stands in contrast to the work of transcription sites like Project Gutenberg, which John Gruber of Daring Fireball described as "an amazing library," but whose books are "a mess typographically."[5][6]
Book covers
Standard Ebooks creates book covers from public domain fine art. Volunteers are tasked to locate a painting suitable for the specific e-book they are producing.
Gallery
- Cover of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
- Cover of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
- Cover of Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Criticisms
In 2018 Standard Ebooks was criticised for having a library that consisted of only 10% women, and only a handful of authors of color featured.[7]
References
- "Free eBooks with Modern Typography & Nice Formatting, All "Carefully Produced for the True Book Lover"". Open Culture. 21 June 2017. Retrieved 17 June 2020.
- Pot, Justin. "Standard Ebooks Offers Public Domain Downloads That Aren't Ugly". How-To Geek.
- "Standard Ebooks". GitHub.
- Austin, Patrick Lucas. "Standard eBooks Is a Gutenberg Project You'll Actually Use". Lifehacker.
- "Standard Ebooks". daringfireball.net.
- "Fill up your ebook reader with beautifully formatted free classics". thenextweb.com.
- Standard EBooks Takes Books In The Public Domain & Brings Them Up To Professional Standards So You Can Read Them More Easily from Bustle (bustle.com).