Standard Ebooks

For those of you that follow this blog for many years, you might remember an old post about buying an ebook reader. That was back in 2012, and a lot of things have changed since then. However, my appreciation for that little device is not among the things that did change, and I am still a proud owner of an ebook reader. Even though my originally device was stolen, I did buy a second one, and currently is one of my most beloved pieces of technology (much more beloved than my smartphone).

One of the main reasons for diving into the ebook world back then, was the fact that I could read for free (and legally) books that were in the public domain. I had heard of a great service called Gutenberg project that was publishing ebooks of famous works, produced by volunteers. However, after the initial enthusiasm, I came to realise that the quality of their productions was making reading the ebooks more of a nauance rather than a pleasure. I think, up to today, I never managed to read a gutenberg production and preferred to pay for a clean edition instead.

This has changed recently, when I discovered Standard Ebooks. Their mission is to take books from the public domain (usually extracted from Gutenberg project) and create a fine production of the book for modern ebook readers. They pay huge attention to typography, style and semantics, so that you can enjoy reading the book. And their collection keeps on growing and growing, offering a lot of the most famous classics already.

I saw that their work is based on volunteers, and I immediatelly joined the mailing list. After reading a couple of productions (such as this one, this one and this one, I decided to jump and produce a book myself. I chose a book I read a long time ago called The book of Tea from Kakuzo Okakura, and followed the very detailed instructions and manuals provided by the Standard Ebooks community. After about 10 hours of work, the production was ready :)

So here I am, presenting you my first ever ebook production, with the help of the Standard Ebooks community:

It has been a very satisfactory experience, and I learned a lot about typography and how does the epub format work. So if you are into such things, definitely give it a try! If not, then at least enjoy their amazing productions!