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idoubtit 12 hours ago

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 7 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 2 hours 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" ...

jcurtis 11 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 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

SE sounds truly, truly awful. Thanks for making me aware of its existence so I can avoid it.

phaedrix 6 hours ago | parent [-]

They're providing beautifully made ebooks for free...

The only thing they are is truly, truly wonderful.