Our projects are built with the broad assumption that the latest tech is supported across the board: the “advanced epub” is generated by zipping that up and renaming it to .epub. The build step then runs the book through a compatibility pass to remove some of the functionality that simply isn’t there in many readers. For example, it:

1. renders the cover as a JPG from the native SVG

2. converts more complicated selectors (e.g. :nth-of-type, :empty, etc.) to classes and class selectors

3. renders MathML as images

4. renders SVGs as images

…and a bunch more things to make it work better with older ereaders, which tend hang around for a long time.

It’s worth pointing out that the Kobo builds are closer to the “advanced” build as they have great native support for MathML and SVG. But the build step adds in a bunch of Kobo-specific markup to make it work better there.

In my experience, Apple Books does the best with the advanced builds, but it doesn’t support SVG covers so you end up with autogenerated ones, which seems a shame. I’ve sent a couple of feedback issues to them over the years, but if anyone else wants to also do this feel free.

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

Yep! Have a look at our contribution page that lists a bunch of different options, including a list of good first books. https://standardebooks.org/contribute

The historical criteria is fine-art style oil painting. These days we’re starting to use first-edition cover art a bunch for more modern productions if it’s good quality. We also tend to use abstract oil paintings for sci-fi.[1] Obviously, all art is sourced from the public domain too. We’ve also started a database of confirmed-US-PD artwork that we can use for future productions.[2]

[1] https://standardebooks.org/subjects/science-fiction

[2] https://standardebooks.org/artworks

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...

Nothing particularly in The Castle, from my production of it. As this was not previously PD there wasn’t any Gutenberg (or other) transcription available, so I did my own from the OCR of the original scans. A large part of the feel of the work, to me at least, comes from the extreme sentence / paragraph lengths though.

We do have a default typography across all our works (the “Standard” in “Standard Ebooks” refers to a standard imprint; think Penguin) but we usually retain specific famous things where possible in a reflowable format. For example, the Mouse’s Tail in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,[1] or the letter in E. A. Poe’s “Thou Art the Man”.[2]

We don’t take on other languages, no. Our tooling[3] and style guides[4] are tailored specifically to English. Absolutely nothing stopping another project from forking the codebase (it’s GPL-3) and giving it a go.

[1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/lewis-carroll/alices-adven...

[2] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/edgar-allan-poe/short-fict...

[3] https://github.com/standardebooks/tools

[4] https://standardebooks.org/manual/

It seems you may be making assumptions that the formatting and typesetting of any particular edition were intentional or even deliberate on the part of the author, not any number of people, from editors to printers, who could and would have influenced those things for various reasons.

Something I am rather familiar with is brought out by your mention of the German edition/title; that the continental market seems to generally produce books that are far more densely formatted, i.e., smaller font and typesetting, thinner pages, and leading to overall tighter book formats. I actually appreciate it when, e.g., a book is 1/2 the size and weight, and usually also made far more durably; but it will invariably compromise any author intention related to the arrangement of the lettering.

Maybe you can confirm that based on what seems to be your English and German editions of the same novel.

I seem to remember that they had some very opinionated rules at the beginning regarding allowed spelling and typography. Some of them felt distinctly American to me. I don't know if that's still the case.

Apart from that, they produce nice editions.

We do include illustrations, but in fairly defined categories: when they’re factually illustrative, when they’re graphs or charts, when they’re part of the plot (an illustration of a clue in a murder mystery, for example), or when they’re referenced from the text.

The last point is why the Beatrix Potter compilation I did ended up with illustrations: the text specifically references the illustrations in a couple of the books (“Can you see…?”) so they remained. It did mean writing 602 pieces of alt text though[1] so it was a fairly major undertaking to include them.

[1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/beatrix-potter/short-ficti...

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.

[1] https://github.com/standardebooks/standard-blackletter

I’m not based in the US and have no intention of travelling there, so I don’t count myself in much danger for US copyright law.

Regardless, my understanding of copyright is that people broadly get annoyed when you infringe by distribution. In this case the distribution didn’t happen until the copyright had expired. People preparing these projects for later launch do it purely on their own machines, and nothing arrives at Standard Ebooks until the day of release.

SE makes ebooks available in four formats: "compatible" epub; "advanced" epub; kobo-compatible ("kepub"); and kindle ("azw3"). No PDFs.

One of the SE editors experimented with turning SE ebooks into PDFs, though. See more about that here: https://groups.google.com/g/standardebooks/c/Xy2bwiexLeM/m/f...

I don't know their reasons but PDF is a rather problematic format so I suspect that's why.

You can run their EPUB through Pandoc to convert yourself, or put some effort in and setup your own Calibre instance which will do something similar when you ask it to.

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.