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| ▲ | idoubtit 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Not the GP, but I also have mixed feelings about Standard Ebooks. They modernise texts for American readers. This means changing the punctuation, merging some words, altering the syntax, etc. When I read an old novel, written two centuries ago in England, the little differences to modern English are part of the charm, and I certainly don't want any Americanism mixed in. For one of my favorite novels, The Forsyte saga, the author deliberately used some rare forms of words, which SE replaced with the mainstream forms. | | |
| ▲ | acabal 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | SE editor in chief here. What you describe is incorrect. The only thing we do is very light sound-alike spelling modernization, like "to-night" -> "tonight". We do not do things like change from en-GB to en-US, replace old words with different modern words, or change text for "American readers", whatever that means. I have no idea where you got that impression. I personally worked on the Forsyte saga. If you think something was done in error, please let us know and we'll be happy to fix it. | | |
| ▲ | natex 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > The only thing we do is very light sound-alike spelling modernization, like "to-night" -> "tonight". Curious. Why even bother? | |
| ▲ | tangledhelix an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | One could argue that this falls into the previous poster's thought about "the little differences to modern English are part of the charm" ... |
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| ▲ | jcurtis 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You may already be aware, but SE marks all commits making those kinds of changes as '[Editorial]', so it is generally trivial to use their tooling to build your own high-quality ebook without any of the editorial changes. | |
| ▲ | AdamN 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | SE sounds truly, truly awful. Thanks for making me aware of its existence so I can avoid it. | | |
| ▲ | phaedrix 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | They're providing beautifully made ebooks for free... The only thing they are is truly, truly wonderful. |
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| ▲ | a2800276 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It splits the community and number of possible volunteer hours for one. It also splits the canon into different versions. More projects fight for the attention attention (and possibly donations) of the audience. There are lots of reasons it could be preferable to centralize. OTOH their mission is limited and some competition is healthy, if only to explore alternative ways to do things. | | |
| ▲ | robin_reala 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | It’s a different mission. PG focuses on an accurate digital translation of the source material, sometimes hosting multiple different versions of the same text, and doing things like putting work into recreating the adverts at the back of some novels. SE focuses less of preservation and more on making readers’ versions of the texts, like other publishing imprints. So there’s typography standardisation, a light-touch moderinisation of hyphenation and soundalike spelling, and things like author-wide collections of short fiction and poetry even if it didn’t previously exist. Both are valuable, but they serve different segments. |
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