Standard eBooks Is a Gutenberg Project You’ll Actually Use

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Catlady

I don't know--modernizing seems like a slippery slope. Would a modern reader really puzzle over "to-day" and "ash-tray," and need to see "today" and "ashtray" instead? A spelling like "clew" might be a tad confusing out of context, but clear enough in context.

I would rather see the spellings and punctuation left alone, and some kind of glossary or notes added to explain oddities that are thought to hinder understanding.

And yet, as I noted earlier, this is exactly what the overwhelming majority of commercially-published versions of the classics do, so obviously modern publishers think it makes sense. The "Penguin Classics" edition of Jane Austen's books is about the only one that retains original spelling and punctuation; pretty much all others are modernised (including the PG editions).

[tubemonkey]

Originally Posted by Ripplinger

When I came across "shew" here, Ed Sullivan instantly popped into my head.

Same here

[KevinH]

Would/could these types of changes constitute a new grounds for copyright on these works since they are "edited"?

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by KevinH

Would/could these types of changes constitute a new grounds for copyright on these works since they are "edited"?

No. Editing doesn't confer a new copyright. Only adding original material such as an introduction, footnotes, etc, would, and even then only that new material would be protected by copyright.

[KevinH]

Thanks, good to know.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by Ripplinger

When I first started reading this, I was thinking finally! someone is going to clean up some of the horridly messy books at Project Gutenberg, those that obviously nobody bothered to proofread and are full of OCR errors and extremely bad formatting. That I would love to see done on a large scale.

But like others have already said, I much prefer the original text as it was written. It takes me back in time to the period it was written and I enjoy seeing those differences. It definitely adds a certain flavor for me that I enjoy. I can't see anyone having difficulties reading to-day or develope, it's like reading British English vs American English and think it's silly when they feel they need to change books originally written in the UK for American readers.

Yeah, same here. But if the modernization is done with a light touch, I think the benefits in cleaning up formatting and errors outweigh the concerns about changes to the text. I'm at work, so I haven't downloaded any of the books. But I'm planning to do so when I get home.

[pwalker8]

I tend to agree with those who enjoy reading the language used in the original books. For example, I can't imagine reading Sherlock Holmes updated with more modern language.

I think for the most part, the books that have the most issues in Project Gutenberg are the more obscure books where we are frankly lucky that anyone bothered to scan them to begin with. Sure, I would love to have all the books well scanned and edited, but I tend to have a higher tolerance for scan/edit/formatting errors.

[gbm]

Originally Posted by John F

I'm fine with Guttenberg, but there are two things that look interesting:

And

Keep looking for clean code Standard eBooks actually added to the PG css.

If you need daisy.org formated epubs or have a voice to text reader app that uses daisy then Standard eBooks are for you. They meet the www.daisy.org requirements.

I will down load from PG and do a calibre conversion.
bernie

[Apache]

I also prefer to that the books retain the original spelling and punctuation. The times, settings and characters have an authentic feeling in stories that keep the author's spelling.
Apache

[arjaybe]

I downloaded one: The Innocence of Father Brown. It's nicely done. All neat and tidy like. I did have to run it through Calibre, though, to remove full text justification. There were big gaps in the words.

I salute them for their effort, and the fact that they put a CC0 license on the whole thing.

[barryem]

I've read classics with edited and in original form. This isn't anything new. In most cases I really don't care much which I read. There are situations where I do care. I read "The Canterbury Tales" in original English a couple of decades ago and that was quite a chore but I'm very glad that I did. I learned more about the English language from that than from the linguistics courses I took. Modern English versions were available then but I didn't know it. If I had I might have read one of those and I'd have really missed a great experience.

There are a number of British novels that I've read in American editions and others in British editions. I just read a Dick Francis novel in the British edition because it wasn't available in an American version. It wasn't a big deal. I've done that many times before. If I'd had a choice, though, I'd have chosen an American edition.

I downloaded one of the books from Standard Ebooks the other day and looked it over. I haven't read it yet but it looks pretty nice to me.

By the way, I used to be a volunteer proofer at Gutenberg and I don't agree that they do sloppy work. Every page is checked by at least 3 different proofers. I've also read a lot of Gutenberg books and I've found them to be better done than modern books from big publishers.

Barry

[GeoffR]

I'm another one who prefers the original spelling/punctuation when reading older books. It would be good if they could have separated the cleanup/correction step from the modernisation step, and issued separate original and modernised editions. Especially since 'modernised' also seems to mean 'Americanised'. From their typography manual:

* Our general style guide is the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition, with a few tweaks outlined below. Work following a different style guide should be converted to conform to ours, unless it changes the meaning of the work.

* Do convert from logical punctuation to American punctuation where possible.

* Do convert from British quotation to American quotation where possible. The british2american script is helpful for automating most (but not all!) of this.

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by GeoffR

I'm another one who prefers the original spelling/punctuation when reading older books. It would be good if they could have separated the cleanup/correction step from the modernisation step, and issued separate original and modernised editions. Especially since 'modernised' also seems to mean 'Americanised'. From their typography manual:

Ugh. If I pick up Dickens, I want to read Charles Dickens not Charlie Dickens.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Catlady

I don't know--modernizing seems like a slippery slope. Would a modern reader really puzzle over "to-day" and "ash-tray," and need to see "today" and "ashtray" instead? A spelling like "clew" might be a tad confusing out of context, but clear enough in context.

I would rather see the spellings and punctuation left alone, and some kind of glossary or notes added to explain oddities that are thought to hinder understanding.

One of the problems is that people may think to-day and ash-tray are mistakes. I've seen plenty of mistakes where hyphens where left in where they did not belong.

[bgalbrecht]

Originally Posted by barryem

By the way, I used to be a volunteer proofer at Gutenberg and I don't agree that they do sloppy work. Every page is checked by at least 3 different proofers. I've also read a lot of Gutenberg books and I've found them to be better done than modern books from big publishers.

Barry

Barry, as another volunteer proofer & content provider at Distributed Proofreaders, I'd like to point out that while most of the books at Project Gutenberg are scanned and proofed and formatted by several individuals, PG also accepts books from other volunteers. While DP tries to be faithful to specific original printings of books, this is not true of all PG works, and sometimes the PG book is even an almagam of different editions. The early works were also text only and lost all of the typographic features, like bold or italics for emphasis. It is my impression that the PG mobi and epub editions may be autogenerated from the text or html editions.