Standard EBooks Are a Gutenberg Project You’ll Actually Use
I always try to save a few dollars when stocking up on books for my battered Kindle or iPad. I’m not a big e-reader, but I use it to flip through the classic books I should have read – the books are too bulky to carry with me on my morning and evening trips. Luckily for me, there are thousands of free books at places like Project Gutenberg. Just one problem: many of them look terrible.
You, like me, probably need properly formatted e-books for your devices, or books with covers that are not white text on a blue background. So Standard Ebooks , a volunteer-led project, is republishing public domain e-books according to today’s standards and standards for reading e-books. Each book’s page lists the word count, reading score, and title synopsis, as well as a changelog for the book itself.
Standard Ebooks takes ebooks from sources such as Project Gutenberg, formats and types them with a carefully crafted professional-grade style guide, slightly modernizes them, completely revises and corrects them, and then creates them to use the most up-to-date e-books and browser-based technologies.
The differences between your average Project Gutenberg book and the Standard Ebooks are pretty significant. First, all standard e-books come with aesthetically pleasing front covers rather than sparse text covers.
Eliminated typographic features such as curly quotes and em dashes so e-books look like books rather than text documents. Hyphenation, footnotes, and well-formatted chapter markers are also included to help make public domain books more accessible by bringing them into the modern era.
They are also easy to download to your mobile device. Each book has an epub, Kindle, Kobo and a new “epub3” format for download. On my iPad, opening the epub file in Chrome forced me to download the file before opening it, while Safari gave me the option to read it in iBooks. straightaway.