I run a WordPress agency and while I think the block editor was foisted on wordpress.org far too quickly, it's been a godsend in terms of allowing our clients much more control over their content. The prospect of going back to the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor and templates makes me shudder.
I have no idea about the quality of the sites this produces, but I think your comment about non-technical folks existing is on the money. There are many people who really don't understand how to properly structure even a simple website, and being walked through a conversation with a series of pertinent questions will be a much more satisfying process.
We immediately cancel our subscription as soon as we subscribe for services like Netflix, Disney+ etc, where you keep the service for the month. It's thankfully really easy to susbcribe and unsubscribe these days, so doing it this way means we never unknowingly renew. Must have saved us hundreds of pounds by now.
Same here. I never subscribed to Netflix or Disney+ for the intended purpose of continually paying for it in perpetuity - it was always to watch the one show I want (in <1mo) and then immediately kill it.
Elderly men are more vulnerable to suicide die to lack of social connections. So it makes sense for a project that fosters social connections to prioritize men.
I feel like I've started to see lots of weirdly anodyne comments like this on HN recently, with a kind of pointless summary of all or part of the article. Has this always happened and my LLM spider-sense is tingling too much, or are they written by real people whose purpose I don't get?
But do they really get upvoted for such pointless comments? I'd be really interested to see the numbers. I suppose it could be cargo culting, where they see others do it and think it must work, even if it doesn't.
I imagine some of them do since it's seen as a 'convenience' for the reader who might upvote the comment (and the article itself, if it's something they're interested in). And yes I think it does have some kind of social element - people do it in other places and it drifts back into HN. There's a whole bunch of such folklore some of which gets naturally misapplied to HN, 'don't downvote for disagreement' probably being the most famous-while-inaccurate.
Another question - in https://standardebooks.org/contribute/producing-an-ebook-ste... you talk about "modernising" spelling, e.g. changing "some one" to "someone". This may be against the implicit goal of making these accessible for a general reader, but I prefer to read what was originally written, and it feels like it crosses a line into editorialising rather than letting the original feel stand as-is. (Although of course these texts have already been "editorialised" by their original editors!) Totally your decision given the amount of effort that has clearly gone into this, but I'd be interested to read the rationale for that decision.
I respect this choice of modernization, and I suppose some readers enjoy it, but it makes the publisher's whole work useless to me. When a text has been altered, I can't trust it respects the intent of the author, and any style inconsistency I find may be a by-product of the publisher's mangling.
So, when I care about a book, I never read Standard Ebooks' edition.
By the way, the modernization is more than joining a few words. Sometimes, Standard Ebooks replaces the word used at the time the book was written. For instance:
This time, however, the mountain was going to [-Mahomet;-]{+Muhammad;+}
The previous quote is from Galsworthy's "Forsyte Saga". The author used many French words and French spellings – like "Tchekov" for the Russian playwriter that was living in Paris. These subtleties are lost with the modernization.
I also think some alterations are plain mistakes. For instance in the same book:
if she wanted a good book she should read [-“Job”-]{+Job+};
his father was rather like Job while Job still had land.
Anyone who has read books for classes in high school and above knows that even classics are routinely fucked with by publishers. Even early in the work's history. I remember even in middle school someone would invariably end up with a different publisher's edition of a book for summer reading or whatnot and we'd find changes.
Unless the book is specifically declared to be the original text - and it may have to specify which original text - they're going to be edited.
However, in electronic form it should be possible to include both in one file, or two files with the original in a repo branch once all the document structure stuff has been added. That text will never change, so merging formatting-only changes should be pretty painless.
For every book, Standard Ebooks provides a hyperlink to the original scan, a hyperlink to the original transcription, and a full revision history in which all spelling updates have been clearly marked. To me, this already seems to be going above and beyond—most ebook repositories provide less. I can’t imagine that the marginal benefit from keeping multiple parallel branches would be worth the cost in volunteer time and labor, when maintaining pristine first editions isn’t even a goal of the project.
And of course, none of this matters in the slightest for translated works, which almost by definition includes the vast majority of works ever written.
"As it was written" is a very high bar that is simply not attainable for anything other than fairly recent works in your native language.
> I also think some alterations are plain mistakes. For instance in the same book:
That one appears to not be a mistake, [0] suggests that not quoting the name of the book of the bible being referred to (so [Job] rather than ["Job"]) is the style accepted by Chicago, MLA, and APA.
I respect their choice too, but like you the reason for my question was that I feel I can't trust the end product. Alex said "We only make sound-alike changes, like to-morrow -> tomorrow", which I could just about get along with, but Mahomet -> Muhammad creates an entirely different flavour for me. As Alex said, that's fine, in that it doesn't mean the other editions aren't available, but it is a shame for me when I essentially don't want to use something that has been put together so painstakingly.
I'm disappointed to learn of this editing in Standard Ebooks, having had the misfortune to buy a Barnes & Noble copy of the complete Sherlock Holmes that had a similar approach taken. Book looks lovely, but has an altered chapter order, Americanised spellings and lots of typos. There is a certain amount of editing needed to render the likes of Shakespeare and Samuel Pepys readable, as Middle/Old English is quite a different language, but slight variants from 150ish years ago, or dialects, or the correct spelling according to the Queen's English, add flavour and should not be altered.
That's fine! Our editions didn't erase any of the other editions you can find online and in print. You're more than welcome to select any edition that fits your reading preferences.
Apologies if that came across as at all critical. Genuinely interested in the rationale rather than it being a how-dare-you demand for you to explain yourself!
Spelling varies widely across the eras our ebooks were published in. Therefore we attempt to standardize spelling to what a modern reader might be familiar with. We only make sound-alike changes, like to-morrow -> tomorrow.
This is a common practice that editors and publishers have quietly engaged in for centuries. For example, today you are not reading Shakespeare in the way it was spelled in its first printing.
After reading this comment I couldn't help but picture medieval monks, toiling away copying old manuscripts into "modern" English. Normally a thankless task, so thank you!
Is there epub-specific html markup you could add to changed words to indicate their original spelling? Like alt text for images, but in a span around a word? There's the html "title" attribute, of course, which would work (mouseover shows the title attribute's value), but that isn't semantically correct for the purpose.
I appreciate this service you are doing, but it would be much much better to also have an original version with archaic spelling. Double bonus points for have optional (hidden by default) explanations of words. This would be tremendously helpful to some students.
> "Don't like it? Here is a full refund and you are free to read some other version."
That is not at all what I said.
> You can't claim to care about preserving the works while changing them, and that is changing them.
We do not and have never made that claim. We are creating our own editions of these public domain books, not engaging in historical preservation.
If you want to read classic books in their original spelling, then you must locate first editions. Editors and publishers have updated both spelling and punctuation as a matter of course for centuries. Just look at any three editions of any Jane Austen novel - and you could never read an edition of Shakespeare more recent than 1800.
I think it's important to note that in the past, typesetters and printers had a much more editorial role than the process today. Authors would submit handwritten manuscripts and the typesetters in many cases would have to fix the author's mistakes, spelling, etc. to conform the manuscripts to printing standards with the author having limited communication or ability to proof the final plates
Today, it's much easier for authors to have a greater say in the final presentation due to the digital composition process
You can't use an appeal to tradition as the argument for revision.
I don't see why anyone should care that publishers have edited in the past anyway, even in this particular discussion where my own argument is for conservation. Publishers have done all kinds of things that this very project itself criticises and pointedly set themselves apart by doing differently. So, it's a weak argument for them.
Aside from that, what any other publishers do, even if it's totally common and even universal, doesn't change the argument that they were making that they wish to suggest that those edits cross a line that fixing typos doesn't cross.
For what it’s worth, that’s also exactly how I read your response, which was (to repeat) ‘That's fine! Our editions didn't erase any of the other editions you can find online and in print. You're more than welcome to select any edition that fits your reading preferences.’
I think that Standard Ebooks is a great-sounding project, but I honestly found your response not just flippant, but passive-aggressively rude to the original poster.
But — full disclosure — I also think that it would be a good idea to preserve the spellings found in the original editions you are digitising. So perhaps I inclined to feel the bite of your response more than someone who just doesn’t care.
> I honestly found your response not just flippant, but passive-aggressively rude to the original poster.
I didn’t read it that way at all. How would you have worded it in such a way as to sincerely express the stated sentiment without coming across as passive‐aggressively rude?
> How would you have worded it in such a way as to sincerely express the stated sentiment without coming across as passive‐aggressively rude?
Something like ‘While we understand that some people would prefer to read the original texts (modulo typos, formatting errors and the like), we think that it is preferable to modernize spelling because X, Y and Z.’
In other words, the polite response to ‘I like most of what you’re doing, but I dislike this particular thing’ is not ‘Fine! You’re free to go elsewhere,’ with an implied ‘don’t let the door hit you on the backside on your way out,’ but rather to engage and explain.
Again, I have to admit my own bias against the policy and consequent bias in favour of the original poster.
It is what you said. And for the record, I love the idea of this project. I just agree with the other poster about the location of this line that's all.
The text you have in your “quote” is a lot more snarky and rude than the original message. Did they edit their comment or something? Otherwise—why not quote an actual quote?
Considering the thrust of my comment, I don't understand the question. Obviously paraphrasing someone else's words into ones you like better is a fine and acceptable thing to do. So clearly I am just illustrating the problem by example.
The real answer is twofold.
1. We don't have a special 3rd kind of quote or other punctuation mark for reinterpreted references.
2. The real one: This is not a quote that lies as you imply. It is a new message, that merely uses quotes to denote a speaker, as in a pure fictional work, where the characters dialog is in quotes, even though no actual human was actually quoted.
Are there any other conundrums and baffling mysteries I can clear up for you?
When you use that syntax it looks like you are calling out an explicit quote; you may think that it's a reasonable paraphrase but I think most readers will see what you did as a strawman instead of a paraphrase.
Better to write inline "I feel like what you said amounts to [...]" to reduce the perception they you're making up quotes they someone didn't say or even clearly imply.
No one literate is in any danger of misinterpreting this very basic technique. I don't care about anyone else because it doesn't matter, they will misinterpret regardless, deliberately.
> Obviously paraphrasing someone else's words into ones you like better is a fine and acceptable thing to do.
Wrong. Not only is it tasteless and dishonest (not "fine"), it is against the rules of this site. But regardless of whether it's allowed elsewhere, you still shouldn't do it. (See "tasteless and dishonest".)
Do you "claim" a book, to make sure that no-one else is trying to work on the same book? I presume that's part of step 4 in your link, given that it would be heartbreaking to get 90% of the way through and then be beaten to it by someone who'd started at roughly the same time!
I love this. However, I couldn't find an alphabetical list of authors, which is the way I wanted to browse on my first visit. Instead my only option is to show 48 on a page and paginate through, which is tedious. I know there are author pages - e.g. https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/william-makepeace-thackera... - so I presume it's feasible. An author index would significantly increase my likelihood of understanding what's available and engaging with the content.
reply