Survivorlibrary.com's Collection

[Orbit of Music]

Hello, just came across this project today and was quite pleased with it's goal(along side wondering why this hasn't been thought of before or/and isn't much bigger than it is). My first thought about this project is related to a frustration with another online e-book collection, Survivor Library. Realistic goals or not, i think it's a very interesting collection but was quite vexed by the fact that the curator seems to have basically just compiled the PDFs from Internet Archive or other book scan sources.

I was curious how many of the listed books among the collection might be considered for Standard eBooks, if there are indeed any? I Imagine a number of these wouldn't qualify but a worthwhile fraction would.

[Alex Cabal]

You can read our collections policy here:
https://standardebooks.org/contribute/collections-policy

If you're interested in producing an ebook for us, see our contributors
page: https://standardebooks.org/contribute

Not sure how people are supposed to read ebooks in a state of
technological collapse!

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[C T]

This is something I started to look into a while ago Alex - given that the SE books are all public domain *and* incredibly well formatted and semanticated, building a toolchain for taking a basic e-books and setting it for one of the print-on-demand services (e.g. createspace, which i think is now KDP?) might be doable. But it's a very deep rabbit hole and definitely best left for another project to tackle, but I do think it might be worthwhile, as there's a lot of times that I just want a physical book.

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[Christopher Hapka]

I've worked on projects published in both EPUB and POD in the past, and it's not always a  straightforward conversion, especially with elements like footnotes.

Maybe a first project might be a script to build a printable PDF of a project, since PDF is the most common format used for POD but it could also be useful on its own--it could eventually be rolled into the build script and offered as a download option on the site. Once you have a good looking PDF, POD becomes pretty trivial.

FWIW, one hack I used to use was to use RTF as an intermediate step, since it's easier to generate programmatically than PDF and there are existing tools for generating PDFs from RTF.

[David at Standard Ebooks]

The Calibre software has a conversion from epub to PDF, and you can set up various parameters like margins, fonts and so on, but the results still aren't great.

As someone who has designed both print and epub books in the past (see here: https://thegriggs.org/david/services/), to get a high-quality result you really do need to put in a fair bit of manual work to make everything look right. I don't think any automatic conversion will give us what we want.

[David]

And just to add to David's remark about Caibre: of course, there is also Pandoc for document conversion from EPUB to [whatever].

I have tried EPUB => ODT, and as one would expect, it "works" just fine. But to get the file to something one would be pleased to have in printed book form would take a good bit of massaging. Probably a number of default flags and templates could speed up the operation. But ... I don't this this automatic conversion will give us what we want, either. (But still worth noting in this thread, I reckon.)

FWIW! David / Fife, UK

[B Keith]

The one time I was foolish enough to believe that no one would want a printed version of a book and started with the ebook, I went though a lot of the online services and eventually settled on https://ebook.online-convert.com/convert-to-pdf. It produced the best results for my given design.

But I think the only way for us to do it would be to write some sort of export script that reformatted the code to match pandoc or calibre's output capabilities to get a standard, acceptable look. —He says basically paraphrasing David :-)

Bruce

_________

Gaudeamus igitur iuvenes dum sumus

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[Christopher Hapka]

Just wanted to point out one serious roadblock to creating printed versions of SE books on Amazon: Amazon's public domain policy, which states that they don't accept public domain works for KDP unless they're "differentiated," and specifically listing the kind of work we do as not being "differentiated."

https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200743940

The rules only used to apply to ebooks, but as I understand it CreateSpace is now part of KDP and theoretically governed by the same policy. Obviously anyone who's ever run a search on Amazon knows this isn't enforced particularly well, but it's worth considering.