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.
Tuesday night, I was watching through one of my absolutely all time favorite comfort watches: “Sweet Danger,” a double episode of BBC’s Campion.
Amanda Fitton and Albert Campion’s flirting remains dear to my heart years after first watching. Dawwww.1 Series needs a dang Blu-Ray.
As I do, I got curious about seeing which of the Campion ebooks I have managed to accumulate — I have a complete run of the print books back when Felony & Mayhem had the license to print the print books — but…you know.
The First Oddity
What I found confused me, because while I wasn’t expecting to see the classic (to me) F&M covers, I was expecting to see the relatively profession covers of Open Road Media’s versions which have a certain panache. Instead, what I found was several variations of AI-generated content:
NOTE: This particular version doesn’t claim a publisher, as far as I can tell.
At least a solid handful of the books would still have the Open Road Media edition but would also have one of these newer versions priced lower so the “Albert Campion Series Page” is largely full of them. The general quality between the two covers is immediately obvious:
Open Road MediaAsimis
Now, AI book covers is not necessarily a truly-bad sign even if it is not necessarily ideal for hopes-getting-up, but I was also pretty confused (especially when care is not taken to capitalize “Albert” in the cover).
The Second Oddity
Allingham’s works are not, largely, in the public domain. Black Dudley2 is, and Mystery Mile. At least in the US (which Amazon dot com should be following).
Asimis is out of the Ukraine.3 They mostly cover the first four books so it is possible there is a different pub-dom situation there, or even a different licensing. Again, not sure how that impacts the American version of Amazon.com, but there you go.
There are two other publishers, though: “Unabridged Books” and “Adhyaya Books House LLP.” The latter is from India. Absolutely no clue about the first since it is effectively an impossible term to search with definite confidence. They bounce around in later volumes, here or there. Sometimes leading to copies with the completely wrong cover:
How does the “official” copy of a 200pp book get up to 5.2MB?
I have no idea the licensing, and so will assume this is all above board, but it does show how “manipulation” of prices can break Amazon’s Kindle listings when multiple versions of an ebook are available. Which can have some surprises for the end-user. Especially in the light of Amazon’s somewhat infamous 1984 incident back in 2009. [To this day, an incident taken majorly out of context by people who use to try and prove that Amazon is deleting books on the reg.]
NOTE: The Asimis books seem to be sub-licensed through De Marque who have a philosophy of accessible ebooks. Let me tell you how I know.
The Third Oddity (a two-fer)
In what is a perfectly Doug whoopsie, I accidentally fat fingered the “Buy Now with 1-Click” button while trying to simply scroll over to find out more about why there were multiple editions. That’s how I ended up with a copy of this book:
Goodbye $0.99, it’s like I barely knew you.
Right after mis-clicking, I let out a long sigh and then decided to look deeper to figure out more about what was happening. Here are some things I learned.
The Asimis illustrations seem to be taken from disparate sources. I do not mean to say that they are taken from various editions of Campion stories, they just seem to be either old images from other books or AI-generated images in an older, Victorian style. They “fit” the general shape of the passages to which they are attached, but also lead to a strange cognitive dissonance.
The Asimis text is different (with some typos/glitches but better reflow). I first noticed the missing quotes in the text at the start. To do some comparisons, I got my copy of the Felony & Mayhem paperback and went to the same chapter and had a little bonus surprise. The text was very slightly different. “Although you’re a foreigner, Squoire…” had no “Squoire” in the paperback. To check, I got the Open Road Media version of the ebook and checked it (yes, Space Pilgrims, thanks my misclick I now have multiple versions of the ebook on my Kindle…for accidental science!).
Not only does the Asimis have slightly different text with some additional words, in 70% of the cases it has better reflow with clearer paragraphs. Though, there are places where it breaks in other ways.
AsimisOpen Road Media
For those curious, in the print version it looks more like this in the Felony & Mayhem print book:
Open Road Media wins that fight, even if it’s paragraph spacing outside of it is lacking.
Here’s another change in text, though, where I like Asimis’s version:
AsimisOpen Road Media
I just like the “The name was a local one, derived” more than “The name was derived.” The former doesn’t really add anything but rhythm, and rhythm is important.
My guess is there is some difference between the American vs British text or some such, and that is causing it (Asimis using double-quotes in the American English standard).
The Fourth Oddities
Wrapping up, because this was more to document the strangeness rather than say anything particular [besides maybe Amazon should let you filter publishers more easily/readily and needs to control its dang Authority files…FRBR FRBR FRBR, amirite, ‘brarians?]
Here are two things I cannot confirm because I am not going to accidentally buy more copies of these books [please, fat fingers, please], but I saw two complaints while checking reviews that might be of importance:
(1) One reviewer of Mystery Mile said they were frustrated that it was simply a repackaged Black Dudley. The narratives of both are fairly different so my guess is that there is at least one version that gave one of the books the wrong title. I glanced through all the previews I could, but did not see it, but it could have been a paperback version. Or the reviewer might have been talking about broader themes.
(2) A reviewer of another “illustrated edition” said the the images were risqué. I have no idea their tolerance and have learned from experience that it could be anywhere from “lingerie” to full nudity.
Doug’s Final Thoughts
The primary final thoughts I have are, in order of importance to myself:
You should read more Campion. Yes, you. Allingham was delightful.
Campion needs a dang Blu-Ray+ edition.
I would 100% adore a Sweet Danger movie as long as they accepted the weird mish-mash of gangsters, evil businessmen, satanism, English folklore, “Local shops for local people,” and twee flirtations.
Amazon needs to figure out a way to keep this in control before it gets even worse when a billion versions of book can be insta-plagiarized by AI.
While not a long list at the best of times, the only on-screen flirtation that makes me giggle more is from The Mummy and that one is practically cheating because damn, son. ↩︎
Another publisher is listed as Andrii Ponomarenko, also from the Ukraine and also from Kyiv, with very similar covers across the books and very similar by-lines, so I assume this is the same person/entity. ↩︎
On the left is my Kindle Colorsoft. On the right is my Kindle Voyage. I thought about cleaning them up for the shot but I think it drives home just how often the two devices are used.
A Brief History of My Kindle Usage
My first Kindle (Gen 2) was purchased in 2009. One of the older, “clunkier” models with the big side buttons and the built in keyboard. I used it a good bit. Kept it largely on airplane mode and “side-loaded” it from downloaded content.
When the storms hit Huntsville back in April 2011, that Kindle was used to keep track with the outside world and I used a mixture of it and a old flip phone to order equipment we needed to survive.
For five or so years, the Paperwhite was my primary reading device though I honestly do not recall how often I read from it. Often, I would say. Around here, somewhere, I probably started to read Kindle books as often on app and website.
Voyage and Colorsoft
I got a Kindle Voyage in 2017. Oddly enough, it was the Oasis that caused this. I was interested in a new Kindle and Oasis was getting a lot of hype but for whatever reason, the Oasis simply did not gel with me and I ended up with the Voyage as “a replacement.”
For the next eight years, it was the center of my reading life. Now, this was also the time after Barbara’s birth and then COVID and then the accident so it was kind of a weird time for me to read. I read pretty frequently, but we’re talking about maybe thirty books per year compared to three times that a few years prior.
I really liked it. It was often in my bookbag to pull out when I wanted to read for a bit. It also has a bit of personal history for me:
Got to love the cat hairs just baked right on in, eh?
That sticker, I think, came from one of the last outings before the accident made it hard for me to go to such things [and roughly impossible to carry Barbara around on my shoulders]. We were going to see some test launch in May 2022 and I don’t recall what it is because of reasons [a couple of months before and after the accident are only skeletal in my thoughts, the trauma kind of melted most things away] but I snagged a sticker promoting the then upcoming Artemis mission.
I might be conflating two different events, but that’s ok.
Here’s one of my favorite pictures and B and me…
I was absolutely enjoying the heck out of the Voyage with possibly two complaints:
It had 3GB which seems like a lot of space for an e-reader but my ebook library [not including all the comics and definitely not including all the RPGs] is around 6-7 +gig. Tossing in comics and RPGs and it’s 60+ gigabytes [maybe 100+ gig]. I was already having to decide which books to keep and which ones to delete.
It was a bit sluggish, really. It was clearly meant to handle smaller amounts of books without a lot of on-screen manipulation.
Still, the inertia of having to reload 1000s of ebooks kept me uninterested for years, until finally Christmas 2024: Kaz bought me a Kindle Colorsoft as a gift.
Around here, we were already planning to move to Belgium so I held on to it. After the move, once I confirmed it would work and I would not just be bricking a device, I started using it. I cannot buy a new Kindle [if I wanted to, which I don’t] and have it shipped due to geography-lock but it seems like setting up one already bought with an already established account works ok. For now, at least.
For the past year, it has been an astounding e-reader. It works more or less like I expect an e-reader to act. Nearly every complaint I have about it is based on Amazon’s own stupid restrictions to handling non-Kindle content. The enforced ecosystem stuff is dumb.
Which has started to be a problem because there are some books here or there from other sources I’ve been trying to read and I end up having to use various work-arounds to avoid using the Send to Kindle feature which works ok but is awful in the metadata (and oopsie-boopsies the covers because, I assume, of entirely petty reasons and nothing else).
Then…something occurred to me.
The Return Voyage
You know things are bad when Youtube starts recommending videos about jailbreaking Kindles to you. Like, out of the blue. I didn’t go “how jailbreak kindle pls?!” or anything.
Seeing how much they are pushing AI to be pre-loaded on the newer Kindles, maybe soon. Not yet, though.
It did get me thinking. I like the e-ink display. I considering Amazon’s Ember to be my favorite e-reading font [fun fact, I just realized while writing this post that I could download Amazon’s Kindle fonts]. I have been using ReadEra for my phone but something about the interface was missing a little bit. I like it a lot but I missed the vibe of an e-ink book.
Sure, there are Kobo e-readers. Those are a pretty big deal here. Just…you know, more gristle for the pig-farm. Also, via BOL.com I have picked up a few Kobo ebooks and having them locked by third party DRM is not in any real way an improvement. At this point you can’t even say something like “But they are more customer supportive!” because no company likes customers anymore. They only time they pretend to like customers is when there is a bigger fish is in the pond and the pretense of customer service is baked into a business model. Everyone is just waiting to sell out to said bigger fish so the cycle can continue.
What I want is an e-ink reader that jumps straight to KOReader and 100%, absolutely, is not primarily a storefront masquerading as a device. Not necessarily a e-ink display tablet that can also do my taxes. Just like…locked the hell down to launching KOReader. That sort of thing. Let me pay €200 and get 64GB + e-ink + an app that can read pretty much all the “open” ebook formats.
Yesterday, I finally realized that thanks to Calibre, it is relatively trivial to convert any of my ebooks to a format that a 2017-era Kindle can read and a 2017-era Kindle is from the time when Amazon was still considering side-loading to be a primary access point. They may have started discouraging it by that point, but they were mostly fine with it. Books were stored on the device with names like
The Shadow King of Lancelot Book 17 (Light Novel The Shadow King of Lancelot Series)
As opposed to things like
BR1922298Q1521_azw
I got my Voyage out, got out an old charger, and then spent a fair amount of time recharging it. Let it get through all the stuff it needed to get through to wake back up after a year of not being used. Relatively updated. Relatively synched. All that.
Then I told to say goodbye to mama.
Turned on Airplane mode, hooked it up to computer, and viola. Spent last night reading the back half of a Reggie Oliver Book. Today will be finishing up The Seven Dials Mystery by Agatha Christie (may I recommend StandardEbooks version if you would like a free copy?).
It made me very wistful for a time when companies like Valancourt and Tartarus Press would just sell you ebooks directly instead of having to go through Amazon. I assume a variety of reasons drove such a thing.
It is madness how much ebooks have been tainted in such a short period of time.
Over time, I’ll probably remove most of the Kindle books off of the Voyage and just it exclusively for other ebooks without going through send-to-Kindle [not least because I just assume Amazon is gobbling those up to support its AI].
It’s a terrible boorish workaround but it is nice to bring back my Voyage without it simply being “yet another Kindle” in my collection.
Once support officially ends for the pre-2013 Kindles, might be time to start properly hacking my old Paperwhite. Just to see.
At this time, not really planning on getting another Kindle unless something big changes in their ecosystem. Let’s see how long these two last.
