Today I had need of an ebook from a work in the public domain. So naturally I went to my favorite site for this purpose: Standard Ebooks.

I started thinking that maybe some of you aren't aware of this site so I should introduce it. So I will 😃 You might consider this a bit of a sequel to my article about Happy Public Domain Day 2023 that I put up a week ago.

Standard Ebooks

I imagine most of you have found your way to Project Gutenberg at one time or another. There are several projects on the net that transcribe old public domain books and make them available for us in a number of ebook formats; Project Gutenberg is the biggest of these projects and is likely the one more of you know about. It's an amazing service! All of those books that were previously only available in a library or as a expensive annotated edition from some publishers are now free!

But there is a problem. Namely that the formatting in most of these ebooks is atrocious! There are spelling errors, missing words, missing sentences, line breaks in the wrong place, chapters that run right into each other, and so on. It is a free service so we can't be too critical of the transcribers who donate their time typing these books up for us, but the mistakes are often enough to make reading the ebook a less than fun experience and enough to send us to Amazon to pay for a copy that someone has cleaned up (tho you do have to be careful with that; many sellers of public domain ebooks on Amazon just give you the unaltered Project Gutenberg copy).

Enter Standard Ebooks. These guys take the most popular books on Project Gutenberg and clean up the text. They fix spelling errors, re-add anything that was missing, fix formatting mistakes, and so on. They go a step above that in that they standardize the spelling, formatting, and punctuation. Historians may not fully agree with that, but I think most readers will. Trying to parse old, outdated spellings or old punctuations can be difficult, so having those updated is a great feature.

In addition to fixing the formatting, they also improve it. Two great example of this is changing straight quote marks to curly quotes (i.e., "" → “”) and changing the old two hyphens notation commonly used on typewriters to em dashes (i.e., -- → —)

As if all of that wasn't enough, they add lots of Metadata that your e-reader of choice might use, a nice cover, and a functional table of contents.

And all of this is free! Just like Project Gutenberg, Standard Ebooks is run by volunteers who donate their time. I can't say enough good about this service.

Here is the link → Standard Ebooks

Because it is a time consuming process to do everything they do, their releases are not fast. But they are always work the look first, before going to Project Gutenberg, if you are looking for a public domain book.

Favorites

Just to give you a place to begin, here's some of my favorites. I've read the Standard Ebooks version of all of these and can confirm they did an excellent job formatting them.

• The Great Gatsby - It finally entered the public domain last year and they were quick to get their version of the text up.
• Frankenstein - Most people haven't actually read the novel. It's much better than the 1920 horror movie.
• David Copperfield - Dickens's novels are often confusing and tricky to follow, but the characters are so good you don't care. This one has great characters.
• Alice's Adventure in Wonderland - I just read this to my kids a few weeks ago.
• A Study in Scarlet - I'm a big Sherlock Holmes fan. Here's the first of them.
• Dialogues - Plato - You may think Plato is too boring or too intelligent to be understood, or whatever, but this is surprisingly readable. There is something really magically about reading the words of a man from 2500 years ago, as well as one of the founders of Western thought.

Anyway, I could go on and on. I've made heavy use of this site over the years. I suggest you do too.

❦

David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku.

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