My company is called Turkey Sandwich Industries, at turkeysandwichindustries.com.
I'm also the Editor-in-Chief of Standard Ebooks, at standardebooks.org. Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven project dedicated to producing commercial-quality public domain ebooks edited to strict typography and coding standards for free and libre distribution.
My website is at alexcabal.com.
- acabal parentSure, but to maintain a CSS framework? Seems like they way overhired.
- No, none have reached out yet. I've had some brief, high-level discussion along those lines with some people in the library industry, and the conclusion I drew is that public libraries in the US are highly fragmented in terms of technological capability. Instead of partnering with individual local library systems, it would make the most sense to - as you mentioned - partner with Overdrive. But there's been no movement in that direction. If anyone from Overdrive is reading, get in touch :)
- I know you griped about this in a different thread, but we won't be doing that, sorry. You can uniquely identify an ebook and its version by using dc:identifier in combination with dcterms:modified in the metadata file. If you desperately need a filesystem-safe string then concatenate those two and sha it.
- As Robin mentioned the typical style is "fine art oil painting", with some wiggle room allowed for exceptionally difficult cases (like Asian-themed books, as there just wasn't much fine art on that subject pre-1930).
We also require that the art have some kind of connection to the book itself, so it's not just some random fine art. Sometimes the connection is a little fuzzy, but we do the best we can given that art must be pre-1930 and also must have been previously published.
(My personal favorite artwork selection of the books I worked on is The Communist Manifesto[1]. That painting was actually made specifically for a different book by Willa Cather[2], but I thought the peasant laborer, holding a sickle in one hand, with a faraway look in her eyes as the red sun rises behind her was just too good to pass up for Marx!)
1920ish was when it started becoming much more common for books to have illustrated dust jackets, so now that more books from that era and onwards are entering the public domain, we opt to use the first edition dust jacket if it's in the appropriate style. Fortunately for us, that era also happens to be the so-called Golden Age of Illustration so it's not hard finding beautiful art to use!
[1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/karl-marx_friedrich-engels...
[2] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/willa-cather/the-song-of-t...
- We have a list of wanted ebooks here: https://standardebooks.org/contribute/wanted-ebooks
First-time contributors should select something from the appropriate section, because that gives you the greatest chance of succeeding and the least burden on our reviewers as you get started.
Our toolset has a help wanted section and some outstanding issues: https://github.com/standardebooks/tools#help-wanted
- The ebooks we produce are entirely in the US public domain, including metadata and any other files. Unfortunately there are basically no good fonts released under the CC0 license. (Most open fonts are released under the OFL license, which is not the same.) Therefore we don't embed any font files, except for Standard Blackletter[1] when necessary, which is a font we developed especially for our use based on public domain specimens, and released via the CC0 license.
- For a literature-focused list of items entering the US public domain on 2026, Standard Ebooks has 20 ebooks prepared for release on January 1: https://standardebooks.org/blog/public-domain-day-2026
- We do the same with our feeds at Standard Ebooks: https://standardebooks.org/feeds/rss/new-releases
The page is XML but styled with XSLT.
- I'm shocked and saddened to hear this. Greg was a deep source of knowledge and support as I started and shepherded Standard Ebooks. He was generous with his time and experience, and unbelievably patient with me, some guy he had never heard of or met before who was just another cold-email in what must have been an endless stream in his inbox. We should all aspire to his high spirit of camaraderie, charity, and kindness. The world has lost a champion of both literature and the free web.
- Firefox does support XSLT. At Standard Ebooks, our ebook OPDS/RSS feeds are styled with XSLT when viewed with a browser. See for example https://standardebooks.org/feeds/opds/new-releases (use view source to see that it's an XML document).
- > "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.
- 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.
- In addition to what Robin mentioned below, some of these placeholders are for books on our Wanted list. I also think it's useful to show readers that particular books are looking for volunteers to produce, and also to show that some books they might want are locked away by copyright for possibly decades. In that sense it's partly a political message.
- Lots of people have tried similar projects in other languages but as far as I know none have persevered.
Personally I think it's important to have one person in charge who is able to approve of the quality of all the project's output; for now, at SE, that person is me and I'm only an expert in English.
- It makes a lot of sense when you recall that HTML and its ancestors were designed to mark up and format documents, i.e. books. One of the most fundamental elements is <p>, which stands for... paragraph.
Each renderer differs in capabilities, and most are stuck in a subset of early-2000s capabilities, so designing an ebook is very much like designing for the 90s era web. Lots of hacks are required to get the same file to look good on many different renderers, and achieving that is one of the goals of Standard Ebooks.
- Yes, we have complete feeds available for our Patrons: https://standardebooks.org/feeds
- I read on an old Kobo, using Kepub files. Their Kepub renderer is quite good.
I think Kindle's renderer hasn't changed significantly for many years, and it had always been pretty bad. I always say that Kindle seems to have been created by people who hate books.
The best renderer around is iBooks on an iPad, which as far as I can tell uses an up-to-date Webkit.
- You can also join our Patrons Circle to have this book added to our Wanted Ebooks list, which is a list of suggestions for our volunteers to work on: https://standardebooks.org/donate#patrons-circle