https://mythaxis.com/2021/02/19/alex-cabal-standard-ebooks/ Skip to content Mythaxis Review Mythaxis Review a platform dedicated to art and technology Mythaxis Review [ ] * About * Recommended * Issue 1 * Issue 2 * Issue 3 * Issue 4 * Issue 5 * Issue 6 * Issue 7 * Issue 8 * Links * Readers * Submit * Covid-19 * Contact * MEWS * Contests [book-1872570_1920] Issue 8 Publisher Interviews Alex Cabal: Standard Ebooks February 19, 2021February 20, 2021 Mythaxis Review 0 Comments by David R. Grigg --------------------------------------------------------------------- Author David R. Grigg talks to Standard Ebooks publisher Alex Cabal (via podcast transcript). [Up-from-Slavery-724-cover] David: So I'm talking today with Alex Cabal, who's the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Standard Ebooks, which is a voluntary organization dedicated to producing beautiful, well formatted ebooks of classic works of literature, and that's the whole philosophy behind the organization. Just a bit of a background about yourself first, Alex. Where did you grow up? How did you come to where you are today? Alex: Well, I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and spent my youth there and then I went to university in California in Los Angeles. And I studied computer science and English. I studied. I did both, with a minor in English. After university, I went into a job as a computer programmer, a web developer, and I didn't quite like this sort of nine to five situation, so I decided to start my own business, which is Scribophile. That's my main source of income. And after that I took the opportunity to work remotely. This is probably 13 or 14 years ago, so it was not nearly as common as it is today, and so I was one of the very early - I guess you could call them digital nomads that now you hear about all the time. When I was doing that 13, 14 years ago, I was one of the few people doing it at the time, and so I spent a lot of time travelling through Europe, through Australia, New Zealand, Asia, other places. South America. And once I felt like I was done with that, I came to Chicago, where a lot of my family lives. And I decided to settle down there. So I've been here for a while now in Chicago. David: Okay. So what gave you the idea of starting Standard Ebooks? We'll talk a little bit later about Scribophile. But what was the impetus to start Standard Ebooks, which I think you've described as a hobby? Alex: Yeah, it's basically a hobby right now. I mean, we only recently started accepting donations, but it's not like there's a huge amount of money coming in, so it's definitely still in the hobby level. And I started it because when I was travelling I was living in Germany for a while - a year or two - and it was very difficult to find English language books there. You have to be in a big city and I wasn't in a big city. And so I had my e-reader at the time. I think it was a Nook at the time. And I started buying books from the Amazon Store, from the Nook Store and the formatting was just really bad on all of them. Again, this is probably more than eight years ago, probably ten or so years ago, and at the time, a lot of the back catalogue books that they had for sale, even for the major publishers, were just bad OCR - optical character recognition - transcriptions, and so they would be filled with typos and errors, and so I'd be sitting there really mad that I'm really paying a lot of money for this book that is not really very good quality at all. You would never print this on paper. It would be embarrassing. So I started collecting them for my own library, not to distribute, but just for myself, because I bought these books and may as well keep a nice edition for myself and then over time I decided to download some stuff from Project Gutenberg, because everyone knows that it's a great source for a huge variety of classic literature and other public domain literature, and so, I started downloading those ebooks and transferring them into my e-reader. And I realized that although they weren't at the level of raw OCR - they were fairly good quality in terms of typos and stuff like that, but they were clearly not formatted for what an e-reader can do. And so you're reading these books that - the typography of them was more akin to a webpage than it was to a print book, even though you're reading them on an E-Ink device that's supposed to be like a print book. So I took the jumping off point that I had with doing my best to edit these commercial ebooks for my own library. And I said to myself, why don't I just do this for these public domain books and the benefit of doing that is that I can just give them away again? I can set up a website and distribute them and then everyone can enjoy these well-produced books that I was doing for myself, but really, anyone would be interested in getting a copy that is produced to this kind of standard. And so that's kind of how I got started and I had been doing them for myself for maybe a year, just kind of on and off, before I decided to sit down and set up a website and start distributing them officially. So I set up the website, probably I want to say six years ago, five years ago or something like that. And it got featured on Hacker News, which brought in a lot of traffic. It got all over Reddit and a bunch of blogs and news outlets. And everyone seemed to really like the project and from then on I just kind of decided to make a hobby out of it and then here we are many years later and hundreds of ebooks later and hundreds of contributors from all over the world later, it's become a very big and I'd say successful effort that people enjoy, so I'm very proud of that. David: I think you have a great deal to be proud of. You're coming up to nearly 500 books on the site. Which is interesting in a sense. It's a mixture of books of different origins, different genres. They are all public domain books. But how did you decide which books you were going to start to work on and what was the choice of the first few books you decided to work on as official Standard Ebooks productions? Alex: Well, the original books are basically ones that I wanted to read for myself. So it was all kind of within my own personal taste of things that are interesting. I don't remember which one is the very first one, but the very early ones were Dracula, and The Enchiridion by Epictetus, which nowadays we would probably put in a compilation because it's very short, but because it was one of the very first books that we made, it's just on its own now. [The-Enchiridion-779-cover] Some other ones were Princess of Mars. That was one of the early ones. Books like that, and so they're kind of all over the place. Kind of a span of philosophy and classic fiction, and then also whatever modern fiction - I personally enjoy science fiction a lot - we can fit in that is still public domain. I wish people wouldn't call them classics because that's not always the case. I mean we definitely do have a lot of classics that are the kinds of books that you might read in school or that everyone has read at some point and so they have some kind of cultural influence. The books we do are all public domain, but they can be a lot newer, so we have a lot of sci-fi books on there from the 50s and even 60s that fell into the US public domain for various reasons. [A-Princess-of-Mars-761-cover] There's some other modern stuff on there, and also a lot of more scarce stuff that I wouldn't call classics at all. Just because they're old doesn't mean they are classics. I mean, there are philosophy books, or other fiction books that became obscure for whatever reason, but are still very interesting. So we have all kinds of books on there, and our Wanted List originally was books I wanted to read, so my hope with that Wanted List was that other people would do the hard work for me, and then I could sit down to read the books. But as I've been working on this project, people are pulling those books off the list faster than I can read them, and then I'm also reading my own books that I produce for the project. So I've realized that I'm never going to have time to read any of these books anyway, so - David: Well, it's getting the stage where it would be pretty tough to read the entire catalogue, that's for sure. Alex: Right, so it's pretty much out of the question I think at this point. David: So I guess the books that are chosen to work on - it's really up to the individual producer isn't it? - it's their individual tastes that get reflected in the catalogue. Alex: Exactly right. So Standard Ebooks has a collections policy of a sort, which is we basically accept all kinds of fiction. We try to maintain compilations of shorter work where possible, so with someone like H. P. Lovecraft, who wrote a lot of short horror stories, instead of having each one as an individual ebook, we just compile them into one omnibus of all this short fiction. So you don't have to go scrabbling around in downloading hundreds of files. And then we accept some that I call timeless non-fiction, which is things like philosophy and some autobiography, a limited set of biography, that kind of thing. I think that's about it. And then we accept plays, that sort of thing. It kind of falls under the fiction genre. But as you said, it's basically whatever the producer personally wants to produce. That's what they work on because they have to read it, and so they have to have an interest in reading it, and a lot of times that means committing to a really long book. And if they're not interested, then why bother? David: Yes, that's right. Well, having just completed one of the longest works in English literature, Clarissa Harlowe, I would never have read it if it hadn't been for this project. Alex: That's right, you did. I looked at the word count on the website and, it's almost twice as long as War and Peace. [Clarissa-Harlowe-1214-cover-1] David: Yeah, it's a pretty long book and yet it is a single work. Alex: Yeah, very impressive that you finished that. I'm very impressed. David: I'm glad to have finished it, but I'm also glad to have read it. It was a very good book. Anyway, I don't think I would have read it if it weren't for doing it for the project. But the other thing I guess is that producers like myself do discover books this way. I don't think I'd read any George Eliot before I came to Standard Ebooks. I was looking through one of those Guardian lists of the "Best 100 Novels in English" and I saw Middlemarch by George Eliot. I thought 'that sounds like it's, people think it's pretty good', and so I did that. And that's how I came to discover George Eliot. And I'm really glad I did. She's a terrific writer. That's good. Alex: Actually, I haven't had much of a chance to read George Eliot, so Middlemarch is definitely something that was probably on the Wanted List at some point, but now is still on my personal To Read list. Eventually, once I get around to it, yeah? David: Sure, yeah. Well I'd go for that rather than The Mill on the Floss, which is a bit little bit dull I think, but Middlemarch is pretty good. Now I wanted to ask you about the look of the books and there's a very distinct look because you've emphasised the idea of making really good looking covers and there's a certain approach that you've taken. Do you want to talk about that? The look of the books and how you came to decide on that and how you maintain that policy. Alex: Sure. All of our covers are drawn from art that is also in the public domain. Usually like fine art, oil-painting style art. As I was doing these ebooks for myself, I was thinking that obviously the cover is a big part of a book. And a lot of these books that you download from Project Gutenberg - which was where I was originally downloading them from - have these auto-generated covers that in my opinion, are not very attractive. They were just kind of these random geometric shapes and very bright garish colors and then the author and book title are on there with not a whole lot of thought to positioning or layout. Anyway, I thought to myself, maybe we can do something nicer, and if we're already working on public domain books, why not try to find public domain art that would kind of match that theme of the book, and that's kind of the general style of the covers. A producer is required to find a public domain fine art painting that in some way reflects the contents of the book and that just becomes the cover. And then we have a very simple black square with the title and author under that and it's in the same position for all the books. And so just like the name of the project, it becomes kind of the standard where you can you see this cover like a fine art painting, and then that black square with the particular fonts in the name of the book and author. And then you can say, oh, it's probably a Standard Ebook. I mean there's not a big science to it. I just kind of sat down one day and said these look kind of nice. I've been a web designer for a long time and I wouldn't say that I'm an especially gifted arts kind of person. I am not so much into the graphic design arena, but I spent a lot of time working on these websites so I think part of that came from there, where you just kind of have an eye on margins and padding and what kind of looks attractive and what doesn't. And people seem to like the covers so - David: Yeah, absolutely. There's certainly a very distinctive and a very attractive look to them. Each of the books that you produced, you release or dedicate to the public domain, that was obviously a philosophy right from the start. Is that because the material starts in the public domain? Other organisations or other people might think, 'Oh, I can make money out of doing this', but you obviously decided that wasn't the approach. Alex: Yes, well, I don't think there's a lot of money in public domain books, honestly. If you go on Amazon, any search for Dracula there's like 5,000 crappy editions that someone has put together for an ebook, and they're all free or like $0.99. So there's not a huge money in public domain ebooks. I would say public domain print books, there might be some marketplaces like Dover for example, who make money off that. David: Yeah, it's true. Alex: You can make educational editions or annotated editions like Penguin Classics or something like that, and so that's a different story, but as far as ebooks goes, I never thought there is going to be any money in it, and there hasn't been. As far as the public domain dedication goes, the contents of the book themselves are already in the US public domain, so it's not like our dedication changes that in any way. Even if we had sat down and said, oh, we've copyrighted everything, well, we really haven't because we don't own the rights to the work to begin with, it's already in the public domain. But what we do is we release the entire ebook under the Creative Commons Zero license, which is basically public domain. The book itself includes things like metadata that our producers write, descriptions of the books; they arrange things like colophons and imprints which are additions and are not part of the original public domain text. So all that stuff that our producers produce is in theory copyright by them or by the organization, and so we release all of that to the public domain so that we can say that this entire ebook file from start to finish, everything included, is at least in the US public domain, if not the worldwide public domain. David: So obviously this project has grown and grown since you began it five or six years ago. What do you see as the challenges for Standard Ebooks as we go into the future? Alex: I think the big challenge is going to be finding funding. Like I mentioned earlier that we just started to accept donations on a tax deductible basis, and that was in December. So really, just a few months ago. We're talking February right now of 2021. Getting donations is important because this is becoming an increasingly time consuming project. I'm spending a lot of time doing management work for coordinating all of these volunteers through all these various stages of books, and even though I have a lot of help from our experienced producers like yourself, and a few other people, there's still a lot of time spent in just coordinating the project. Someone might ask a question in the mailing list saying something like, 'This line has this kind of punctuation and I'm not sure what to do about it.' And that simple question might be a one line answer but getting that answer out could take an hour because you have to go and look through the book. You have to see, is this kind of a special case, you have to do some research sometimes and so even if I reply back with like one or two words, it could signal an hour to write that email, so it just adds up during the day and I have a full time job anyway. I mean, I run a business and so it's not like I have 100% free time. And so that's the big challenge of the organization, being able to be funded in a way where I could make this a full-time job and start hiring other people to take on some of this workload on not just a volunteer basis because, well, volunteers are very good, but I think a really healthy organization survives off people who can dedicate their entire time to it. David: Yeah, and there must be some fixed costs like hosting and bandwidth. All those sorts of things. Alex: Exactly right, so I mean, I've been paying hosting costs out of pocket all these years, and it's not a huge amount, but I mean it's not nothing. You know, I would also like to spend time on developing the infrastructure of the ebook production process. Right now we're on a Google Groups mailing list, and that makes me really nervous because Google can pull the plug at any time on any of their products. They could say we're shutting down Groups and then a month later you're stuck. So its infrastructure. Things like getting our own mailing list software going, getting some kind of project management solution going so we have a better way to manage these projects than just one thread on a mailing list. Setting up a public domain art clearing house. One of the most complicated and time consuming tasks, for all of our ebook producers, is finding art. Because you have to prove it's in the public domain in this complicated process. So having a single clearing house where you could say all the art here has been verified by us to be acceptable for use would be a huge time saver for a lot of people. But putting it together is also a huge project. It's not something you can do in a month so. David: No, no, that's right. Alex: All of these things require money or time, and I don't have either of those right now, so once we once we start getting money in, then we can start addressing all these things to improve the organization, improve the production process, help our producers, that sort of thing. David: Yeah, well, I certainly hope that comes about. Before we go I just thought perhaps you might like to talk about your other projects like Scribophile. Alex: Yeah, Scribophile is my sort of main business. I've been running it for 13, 14 years now. Kind of a long time. And it's basically an online writing community where writers sign up and then they post to work in progress, and other writers give them advice on how to improve it. So it's a critique running community. And we're one of the largest independent writing communities online. We have a whole lot of members and we've been - our members have been writing novels-worth of critiques. Every day basically hundreds of thousands of words of critique is written, helping each other improve. And that's what I've been working on. It's my day job. It takes up time to maintain and to manage it. It's a large community, so a lot of people have a lot of various problems that they need to get sorted out over the course of the day. And so I spend a lot of my time on that when I'm not working on Standard Ebooks. And Writerfolio is a smaller business that provides online - I would call it portfolio websites for freelance writers. So if you're a freelance writer and you want to show off your work, then instead of getting a WordPress site which could be very complicated, it could require a lot of customization, a lot of time consumed trying to get your website just right, you can come to Writerfolio, and we have various templates that you can fill out very quickly that are specifically geared to helping writers show off their work. So those are the two things that sort of keep a roof over my head. David: All right. Well thanks Alex. It's been really interesting and Standard Ebooks is a great project. I've certainly personally have enjoyed enormously being part of it since I discovered it a few years ago. So thanks very much for that. Alex: Yeah, thank you David. I'm glad to have you as a contributor. You've done a lot of great work to not just produce ebooks but also to advance the project itself, so I'm very grateful. It's been an honor to know all of these interesting and talented people from all over the world that are - I mean, I've only met you in person - but all these other people I feel like I almost know them because we contract so much on a daily basis and we get so much good work done. So yeah, thank you. David: No, my pleasure indeed. [White-Fang-858-cover] Like this: Like Loading... 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