Standard Ebooks is a volunteer driven project that produces editions of classic public domain ebooks using a professional-grade style manual and modern ebook technology. Each ebook is fully produced, proofread, and corrected by our community of skilled volunteers before being hosted on our website for the public to download free of cost and free of US copyright restrictions.
Similar projects include Project Gutenberg, which is where we get many of our base transcriptions. But ebooks at Project Gutenberg vary greatly in quality, and are usually not formatted attractively or with modern ereading devices and software in mind. Standard Ebooks takes those base transcriptions and produces each one to a commercial level of quality and presentation, including professional-grade typography, and typo corrections.
Because we only work on books that are in the US public domain (i.e., typically but not always published before 1925) and release our own work like metadata to the worldwide public domain via the CC0 license, we are able to release ebooks that are 100% free of copyright restrictions in the US. Anyone in the US can download, read, adapt, or re-use our ebooks without restrictions.
The project has been active and producing ebooks for almost 6 years now, with hundreds of contributors from all over the world working to produce over 430 ebooks to date. On average we release several new ebooks each week, with each ebook taking several dedicated volunteers many hours to produce, proofread, and review.
Besides our ebooks, we develop and maintain a free and open-source ebook production toolset for ebook developers that we use in our own production process: https://github.com/standardebooks/tools
We also maintain the Standard Ebooks Manual of Style, a style guide for ebook production and typography akin to the Chicago Manual: https://standardebooks.org/manual The manual itself is dedicated to the worldwide public domain via the CC0 license and released free of cost.
As the years have gone by, the time required to manage, coordinate, and maintain this large and complex project has grown, and we are interested in seeking funding from donors to help the project thrive and expand. We think accepting donations framed as charity contributions is in keeping with the no-cost and public-benefit spirit of the project, and Fractured Atlas would be a great way to accept funds in that way without the overhead of incorporating a charity ourselves.
