Quote:
Originally Posted by MSWallack
I was very interested in trying to work on some books for Standard eBooks but turned away because the tools are (were?) only available for Linux. That seems (seemed?) to be a somewhat strange and arbitrary limitation especially given that Linux has a smaller market share and userbase than Windows (and I'm not interested in a discussion of whether Windows or Linux is better; that isn't the point).
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I only volunteered on one or two books, and admittedly I
am using Linux, but which tools, exactly? The toolset se is installed via python, so it should be platform agnostic. The only other commands I see in the step-by-step instructions are git (also available on all platforms), and perl (more POSIX than Linux, really--you'd get it on a Mac, too). Perl SHOULD be available on Windows, but if that's the only blocker, surely someone could substitute a Python or a Powershell command in there for Windows compatibility.
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One thing that does strike me about their donate is that it seems to be geared towards sustaining-contributors (to borrow a phrase from the NPR playbook). I don't necessarily want to donate $120/yr, but they have proved useful in the past six months where I almost bought an ebook for $1 or $2, only to realize it's probably in the public domain now, and sure enough, Standard Ebooks had it, so I grabbed it from there instead. I wouldn't
mind giving them the $1-$2 instead, since I'd feel better knowing that people who can't afford it are still able to make use of the books. So maybe having a Donate button on each book page with a <$5 amount prefilled (or even a "pay what you want" button) might get them some more donations.
I'll raise it to their mailing list.