A hurdle for this though, is that building a good website for the Kindle browser is a pain, as the browser's support for various html/css/js features and standards is all over the place, with no debugging tools available.
I say the same thing in every ebook thread: On a purely technical level Kindle is a terrible ereader designed by people who seem to hate books. Buy almost anything else.
Weirdly, about half of them have developed a problem after about 5-7 years, whereby they intermittently stop charging. Replacing the battery doesn't seem to fix it. Might be a problem with the soldering of the USB connector to the PCB?
As a bonus they are Linux based, and you can do fun things like replace internal SD cards with bigger ones, login using telnet and install new applications.
They're also quite a nice embedded ARM Linux machine for a lot less than I could make one or buy one from elsewhere, but I suspect that isn't the core market for a kindle...
As a religious person myself, I actually think this policy is very sensible. Most (nearly all?) religious texts of major world religions were originally written in languages other than English, and so if SE were to try to host those texts the site would have to make an editorial call about which translations of those texts are the "best." That quickly enters very murky theological territory, where one side of a given religion might push for one particular translation, whereas another side would push for another translation.
To give the Bible as an example, Catholics and Orthodox Christians include the deuterocanonical books (e.g. Tobit, Judith, Sirach) in their canons whereas Protestants exclude these. Would the SE version of the Bible include these? Some American fundamentalist Christians claim that the King James Version is the only valid English translation of the Bible, whereas the Revised Version (also available in the public domain) is based on more reliable Greek manuscripts. But some conservative Christians reject the Revised Version and its descendants based on certain theological premises...
Do you catch my drift? IMHO it's very sensible for SE to avoid these sorts of debates entirely by sticking to books where you could argue (with some degree of handwaving) that there really is a "best version" :)
In contrast, part of the SE editorial philosophy is that it tries to host the best (based on academic scholarship, translation quality, academic acclaim, etc.) version of each text available in the public domain, which excludes that "something for everyone" sort of play available to a commercial bookstore. You could rightly argue that this is losing something (it's good to have multiple translations to compare if you're reading a text for critical purposes), but the SE editorial philosophy avoids a certain amount of confusion and clutter for the general reader. So there's a deliberate (you could call it "arbitrary" in some sense, if you wish) tradeoff being made here.
So modern versions of e.g. the Bible could not be in Standard Ebooks. So easiest to not carry any translations.
Bookshops have no problem with this as part of the purchase price will go to the copyright owners of the translation.
It's true, modern versions of War and Peace can't be hosted at SE, but those modern versions generally don't reflect revolutionary leaps in archeology :)
There are modern translations that are permissively licensed and are of surprisingly high quality. See the NET Bible as a prime example. It's also the only one I know of with good translation notes that can be had for free.
The site already hosts a number of works that were originally written in languages other than English, and yet it had no problems making an editorial call about which translations of those texts are the "best." The obvious solution would be to just allowing multiple translations of foreign-language books.
Is there a technical reason to disallow multiple translations of the same text? I can see on the "wanted ebooks" page a number of translated titles[0]; so the project does seem to make editorial decisions about which translations to work on. Obviously, where one translation exists, there may be others that have other advantages.
The Didache
Anselm, Cur Deus Homo
Anselm, Proslogion
Augustine, City of God
Augustine, Confessions
Augustine, On Christian Doctrine
William Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life
Luther, The Bondage of the Will
Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion
Pascal, Pensées
All of these are in public domain.
- "Browse free ebooks in the Encyclopædia Britannica’s Gateway to the Great Books set[…]"[1]
- "Browse free ebooks in the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels set[…]"[2]
- "Browse free ebooks in the Modern Library’s 100 Best Nonfiction set[…]"[3]
(Indeed, the titles are even much longer than that. It feels SEO-ish; not sure why that would be a priority for a free culture project like Standard Ebooks, especially give the momentum and cachet it already has.)
Collections should also have placeholders for unavailable titles. For example, currently the "Utopian Trilogy" collection[4] contains exactly one item, in spite of the size of the set it actually belongs to. When an item is not available because of copyright, that (along with the year in which SE will first be allowed to make its own edition available) should be made clear. Where it's unavailable because no one has yet proofed the text for an SE edition, a clear call to action can be made.
And it's seemingly minor, but on the subject of editions, I wish SE followed closer to the print tradition instead of the modern Web millieu and clearly identified its microeditions as exactly that: distinct editions of the same text. (Yes, that means there are possibly dozens (or hundreds?) of different editions, given that errors can be found after the fact and the SE house style may even change, necessitating updates. No, that's not a problem.)
1. <https://standardebooks.org/collections/encyclopaedia-britann...>
2. <https://standardebooks.org/collections/modern-librarys-100-b...>
3. <https://standardebooks.org/collections/modern-librarys-100-b...>
That looks like it might be search engine optimization.
Have you considered making books sortable by popularity? It might be more approachable for new users if they see books they recognize at the top.
There's been some mailing list chatter lately on how to best format PDF editions, but that's not being pursued on a project level.
I remember when Manybooks used to be what you want. But quality dropped precipitously with self-published new novels, I suspect some money is changing hands somewhere.
What happened to Manybooks? Does Standard Books have a plan for avoiding that?
At SE we focus exclusively on US public domain titles; that's one of the major philosophical points of the project. The other major point is a high quality standard, so it's in our best interest to keep pursuing that. SE became known due to its quality standard, not because it's more free ebooks. Therefore if we strayed from those points then we'd be just another free ebook site, of which there are no shortage.
Quality is also why we reject self-published books that have been dedicated to the public domain, as those are typically low-quality content to begin with. (Though I wouldn't call every single book we host "high quality content" in the sense that each one is up there with Shakespeare. But books that have survived a hundred years tend to have survived because they're not slush.)
Every other book I read now is by an author with NO rating, I have read six this year, none were memorable, or my cup of tea I will give you that, but two of the four- or five-star offerings on Amazon were just as bad. As they say, if you don't open an oyster, you will never find a pearl.
That's not the niche SE has chosen to target. You can't expect them to serve every possible use case.
Edit: oh and Lambda for a total of 2 server functions
I understand that this is their fault and not yours, but maybe it could be interesting for you to offer one of these formats now that the Kindle browser is actually usable?
Do they actually check the file content or just the name?
If the latter, just a .AZW alias to the actual .AZW3 might work ...
(I can't test, don't have a Kindle nowadays)
Once the files are in the Kindle, it would probably work out OK.
I'm not complaining - It's just, there's a reason everyone goes for the existing frameworks and it isn't addiction to complexity. Raw PHP code is legendarily insecure and prone to XSS and other issues if you don't do things exactly right.
Nice site, though.
Not any more so than sites with frameworks. I’ve found XSS issues in Java Spring framework built sites that didn’t “do things exactly right”. A framework doesn’t magically fix that.
Thank you for your beautiful project.
For a few years, every January 1st, for public domain day, I have been promoting SE on social media, the thread on Mastodon is the one with the most involvement. https://fosstodon.org/@paulox/111680544393923401
It would be nice to have an SE account on Mastodon that posts about every new book published, since IMHO it's the social network more aligned with the spirit of SE.
If we did, then someone would have to volunteer to run the account, and also the account must be able to delegate posting powers to another user without exposing the account's master password (like Tweetdeck or Facebook are able to do). If that's possible and you're interested in helping, please send me an email!
Almost all my Kobo books are EPUB and work great.
Kindle will not natively support epub until you can connect it to a USB cable, transfer an epub using a file manager, and it does not get secretly converted.
Re XHTML - It looks like the website is being served with a text/html content type. Did you give up on your XHTML experiment? How did it go? Maybe it would help if browsers reported back errors to the server, like how "Content Security Policy" reporting works.
Of interest might be my blog post on how SE runs on a small VPS using classic web tech: https://alexcabal.com/posts/standard-ebooks-and-classic-web-...
(This post is slightly out of date as there is a database now; but it's used for managing Patrons - and soon a cover art listing and approval system - not for serving the actual ebooks, which are still served as described in the post.)
Our volunteers have spent the last few months preparing a few notable books published in 1928 to be released today, Public Domain Day. Those are the top 5 books in the ebook list, starting with The Mystery of the Blue Train. Check them out!
We welcome new contributors if you'd like to work on producing a new ebook. In the next week we'll also have a brand new cover art database launched, so if you'd rather help by cataloguing new cover art for future ebooks, get in touch at our mailing list!