A few days ago, I wrote about loading up a back-up Kindle with non-Amazon, non-DRM type books. Towards the end of that, I mentioned Standard Ebooks. Just in case you haven’t heard of them (from their about page):
Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven effort to produce a collection of high quality, carefully formatted, accessible, open source, and free public domain ebooks that meet or exceed the quality of commercially produced ebooks. The text and cover art in our ebooks are already believed to be in the U.S. public domain, and Standard Ebooks dedicates its own work to the public domain, thus releasing the entirety of each ebook file into the public domain. All the ebooks we produce are distributed free of cost and free of U.S. copyright restrictions.
There are other sources of pub-domain materials but Standard tries to standardize [hence, you know, the name] and modernize the layout. Having used just a small handful of their ebook versions, the difference is pretty noticeable. Some images and such put back properly. Text-corrections.
Sure, I could somewhat replicate using Calibre and tweaking a few settings to fix up some bits, but still: it’s nice to just be able to read a book without having to pre-edit it, first.
With the realization — from experience of formatting large amounts of text | information over my years as a web & marketing librarian — that such undertakings are hugely time intensive and involve a lot of people using a lot of scripts to download entire catalogs putting strain on a server: I went ahead and signed up for the Patrons Circle, today.
$15 a month and you get a few things like a better feed and a better access to collections. Can also suggest books. I won’t really use any of that.
This is just my general thanks.
The public domain — and stuff like CC-0 — are vital and important. They also require people like the folks at Standard Ebooks to actually provide the media to others. What’s more, I like the way that Standard Ebooks does it.
Recommended. The using of them, not necessarily the donation. Unless you end up really liking them, too.
EDIT: Forgot to add when I first clicked post, bonus points for not requiring me to go through something like Patreon to do this. They do use a third-party system to collection donations but the benefits themselves are currently directly from the site. I appreciate that. We need to de-Third-Party our internet, Space Pilgrims.