Standard Ebooks is a free website that provides classic eBooks, that have been formatted for modern eBook readers. This website takes the classic eBooks that are available on free eBook websites, like Project Gutenberg, and then formats them for modern eBook readers. As a part of formatting, it adds modern looking font, removes any spelling and grammar mistakes, add nice cover to eBook, and a few other formatting things. Finally, it makes the ebooks available on its website for free downloading.
Standard Ebooks is a not-for-profit project that is squarely aimed at making reading classic ebooks a bit more fun. The original ebooks look old and do not have comply with technologies that newer ebook readers have introduced. Standard Ebooks addresses that by reformatting old classic ebooks to make them compliant with modern technologies so you can use some of the advanced features that modern ebook readers provide.
The work involved in converting each eBook is huge, because each conversion involves complete proofreading of the original eBook. And that is why the number of Ebooks available for download are pretty less. However, it is an open source project in which everyone can contribute, so if the concept takes off, we might see lot of books.
Features of EBooks Formatted by Standard Ebooks:
- Improved Typography: One of the main problem with classic / old ebooks is old looking typography. Not only is it old, sometimes it is inconsistent as well. That is one of the first things Standard Ebooks fixes as it adds consistent and modern fonts to ebooks which look great in modern ebook readers.
- Proofreading: A big thing that Standard ebooks does on classic ebooks is that it completely proofreads them. Each book is fixed for any spelling or grammar errors. Not only that, if some spellings are as per old times, they are fixed to reflect the modern spellings.
- Modern Features: Standard Ebooks have modern features that make them extremely comfortable to read with modern ebook readers like Kindle. Each one gets table of content, support for popup footnotes, scalable vector graphics (which don’t distort if you zoom in your ebook reader), and many more.
Other than the above, Standard Ebooks gets a tasteful cover that can be read by ebook readers. You can download these ebooks for free in following formats: epub, azw3, kepub, and epub3.
The Ebooks are completely free and open source, so that anyone can make further improvements to them. If you want to contribute to Standard ebooks, you can follow their guidelines here.
Verdict:
Standard Ebooks is a great concept. I like the features it adds and also the standardization it offers. The only challenge is that it is such a daunting task that only a few ebooks are available at the moment. I was able to find the popular classics like Pride & Prejudice, but the overall collection remains dismally small. I really hope a lot more books are added to this collection so that there is some more reading pleasure while enjoying the old classics.
