[HN Gopher] Alex Cabal: Standard Ebooks
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Alex Cabal: Standard Ebooks
Author : robin_reala
Score : 49 points
Date : 2021-02-20 20:12 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (mythaxis.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (mythaxis.com)
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| I wouldn't exactly call this an objective interview, considering
| the interviewer (David Grigg) is one of the most frequent
| contributors to the project after Alex. :)
|
| https://github.com/drgrigg?tab=repositories
| petecooper wrote:
| Site down, cached copy refers to:
|
| https://standardebooks.org/
| themodelplumber wrote:
| Huh, I just realized that their pagination only shows one page
| of books, but there are in fact many pages of books if you keep
| pressing the arrow button.
|
| I guess I was thinking along the lines of the pagination I'm
| used to, which would usually show more than one page number
| button in the numbering section.
|
| Now I've got some catching up to do...
| ape4 wrote:
| Could this be some be automated? Perhaps train using already
| formatted books
| lukifer wrote:
| I think part of the value of the project is the human curation
| and attention to detail. The "good enough" semi-automated
| approach is what is already being done by Project Gutenberg and
| the like.
| acabal wrote:
| Hi folks, Alex Cabal here! Looks like the site got hugged to
| death. Here's an archive link posted by DanBC deeper in the
| comments:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210220133950/https://mythaxis....
|
| Happy to answer any questions people might have. We're always
| looking for new contributors to produce ebooks. It's a
| combination of a lot of different disciplines and a lot of fun--I
| often say it's like building your own lightsaber.
| Jabbles wrote:
| Is your stance on non-English books something that could be
| changed if you had volunteers with sufficient expertise, or do
| you think that the requirements would be so different that a
| similar (forked) website would be best?
| acabal wrote:
| No, see my comment history for more discussion on this. The
| entire toolchain would have to be forked to support other
| typographical styles, and without a domain expert willing to
| dedicate years to ongoing curation and maintenance of the
| corpus, it's a dead-in-the-water attempt. There have been
| many attempts to fork SE to a different language and AFAIK
| I've never heard of them again.
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| Reminds me of a Spanish forum dedicated to making ebooks, they
| had standardized formats and tutorials and the ebooks where of
| high quality because people would help each other, each book had
| its dedicated thread, and try to one-up each other or procure
| rare books difficult to find. The site went down, because some
| books engaged in robbery by ship at high sea, and a bunch of
| copycats appeared but I never found the forums again. Such a
| shame because that was the most valuable part of the site.
| ibrarmalik wrote:
| I believe you are talking about epublibre.org! I have never
| seen something similar to it in any language I understand. They
| version control the books, have an "issues" system to alert of
| errata, and do their own editions. I have even seen books
| translated by the community.
|
| I stopped downloading spanish books some time ago so I don't
| know if it still holds up.
| hpfr wrote:
| > I have never seen something similar to it in any language I
| understand.
|
| That changed today when you visited this post!
|
| https://standardebooks.org
|
| https://github.com/standardebooks
| IcyHordr wrote:
| I love Standardbooks. It is such a good idea.
| Wolfenstein98k wrote:
| Link is broken
| tomcooks wrote:
| Whole site is broken, hugged to death I presume.
| DanBC wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210220133950/https://mythaxis..
| ..
| jedimastert wrote:
| I'm getting what appears to be a WP error; looks like a
| botched update?
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| Reminds me a lot of this project http://www.limpidsoft.com/,
| which is oriented around public domain works and (oddly enough)
| PDF output, but otherwise seems pretty similar in concept. Having
| encountered this a while ago, I have been wondering: does anyone
| else prefer PDFs?
| throwanem wrote:
| Not for reading on a screen, but they're invaluable for making
| print copies, which I do in order to bind them into books.
| (Which has proven surprisingly easy to do!)
|
| Lately I've been working to do my reading from paper, rather
| than from the same screens that bring all manner of
| distraction. So these days I always look for a PDF first, and
| I'm glad to know about the project you linked.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| That's really cool. I've been thinking it would be really
| nice to do that. How do you print? Laser? In what size? What
| kind of paper?
| throwanem wrote:
| It is nice! It's a diverting hobby with a pleasantly
| tangible outcome, and I've also found that the impetus to
| "finish" the craft by reading the actual book helps me
| overcome a screen-driven need for distraction that's been
| bothering me for a while now.
|
| So, I started answering these apparently simple questions
| and giving an overview of how I make books, and realized at
| just over 2500 words that what I really need to write here
| is a blog post. I need to take some pictures, too; a lot of
| the processes involved will be much easier to explain that
| way.
|
| I actually printed off sheets for a book block earlier this
| morning, so that should make for a good opportunity to walk
| through the whole process complete with illustrations.
| It'll take a while to finish, especially since there's an
| enforced day-or-so-long pause while the binding glue dries;
| that said, I don't really have anything _else_ pressing to
| do on this Sunday afternoon, so I suppose at the very least
| I should be able to produce a Part I in the next day or so.
| I 'll link it here once it's done!
| acabal wrote:
| I'd be interested to learn more about this. Will you
| contact me when your blog post is live?
| throwanem wrote:
| Sure!
|
| (Might be a day or two longer than I thought; I'm midway
| through making a pot of chili. But I'll for sure be in
| touch!)
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| Me too, please! dminkovsky@gmail.com
| burlesona wrote:
| This has been posted frequently. The most discussion is here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20594802
| asicsp wrote:
| Based on the alternate links provided in other comments, the
| submitted link is an interview with Alex Cabal, and the
| interview does mention HN bringing a lot of traffic:
|
| > _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._
| robin_reala wrote:
| Google cache:
| https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%...
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(page generated 2021-02-21 23:02 UTC)