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Thread: Is there a good website for custom "editions" of public domain eBooks?

  1. #1
    Elephant Feirefiz's avatar
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    Default Is there a good website for custom "editions" of public domain eBooks?

    I have been reading eBooks in different formats for quite a while and now I've got a kindle and that has renewed my interest.

    Among the things that I read are books from Project Gutenberg (i.e. public domain, no strings attached.) However there is one slight problem with those books. At the end of the day they are just plain text wrapped in an eBook file format.

    It would be so easy to do better than that. With little effort you could have things like chapter navigation, a title page, balanced quotes, proper hyphens etc. Very often they also contain small errors like messed-up markup.

    I thought about cleaning up texts of one of my favorite authors. In principle I would be willing to do that for my own use, but that seems like a waste. Now I wonder whether there is a place where I could share the results of that work. I would work from public domain sources and my own creative input would be negligible but it is still something that could be useful to someone as long as it is easy to find.

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    Curmudgeon OtakuLoki's avatar
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    Actually, doesn't PG offer the ability for people to upload their own formatting of the various works? Bah, that part of the site seems to have been lost in a reformatting since I'd last checked it.

    Here's one site that is soliciting volunteers for a page at a time proofing and formatting (but I don't know whether you can choose your title to work on.) They also claim to have an active set of forums where you could probably post your question and get a better answer than what I'm giving you.

    I know I've seen the occasional PG book available in a more advanced, or better formatted version that their straight OCR text files. I would also consider checking with the webmaster at PG once you've done the proofing/formatting on your own. They may be able to help you further.

  3. #3
    Elephant Feirefiz's avatar
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    From reading their documentation I got the impression that they discourage reformatting existing texts, especially if they don't follow the original source.

  4. #4
    The Queen Zuul's avatar
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    This is something my company is starting to get into. We began with traditional reproductions of vintage books, but have recently expanded into the ebook market. One of the things we're doing is reformatting public domain books and bundling them with additional information. Genealogy charts on the authors, essays on the work, etc. It's still in its infancy, though, so we only have a handful of titles right now.

    Also, for obvious reasons, once bundled in such a way the books are sold, not available for free.

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    Stegodon SilverTygerGirl's avatar
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    I have a ton of ebooks and I think a lot of them I'm going to end up going through and fixing up. Between the poor formatting, the poor font choice (Courier is not all that readable to me), and the occasional typo, I end up noticing the format more than the content.
    When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When all you have is a bowel disruptor, everything's a poop joke.
    www.CuriouslyLydean.net - comics, cocktails, writing, and other odd things.

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