Do you edit your eBooks?

[Aleron Ives]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

I'm also glad for the likes of Standard eBooks for making stuff better.

I would also recommend Global Grey over Gutenberg. Julie has curated a wide selection of e-books, and the formatting is much less janky than what you can get from PG. She does seem to like putting empty lines between paragraphs, rather than using indentation, though. I'll still take that over a PG book that has been formatted with newlines in the middle of sentences to fit a fixed number of characters per "line", though.

[ownedbycats]

Oooh, another site for my bookmarks!

[issybird]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

the likes of Standard eBooks for making stuff better.

Another site I’d recommend for nice free editions of a select list of mostly women-written classics is girlebooks.com. A member here, khalleron, lists her books there.

[John F]

Originally Posted by PeterT

Ummm. Sitting here shaking with anticipation

Sent from my Pixel 7a using Tapatalk

Originally Posted by DNSB

↑↑↑↑

Ditto.

Anticipating the obligatory bashing of Standard eBooks.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

Ugh, I dislike stock Gutenberg books.

I appreciate what they do. I think it is very important. But then I'm also glad for the likes of Standard eBooks for making stuff better.

Started in 1972, the base format is supposed to outlast fashions such as mobi, azw3, epub2, epub3 etc.

I guess designed for teletypes and 80 x 24 Terminals.

I put them through a filter that automatically changes extra paragraph space to a first line indent and mostly fixes typewriter quotes to real quotes.

Sometimes TOC, file divisions and Blockquotes need manually edited.

I started by downloading plain text and doing formatting of it about seven years before Kindles even existed. Then for a while downloaded the mobi with images version. Now I download their "epub3" and convert it to epub2 with "smarten punctuation", make spaced to indented, remove line-height and white-space.

Gutenberg have a different aim to GlobalGrey or StandardEbooks or even https://sacred-texts.com/
BTW, the CD, DVD or FlashDrive from Sacred Texts is likely a copy of the their web pages. Copy & Paste of any PD stuff on their site to LO Writer seems to be the only solution. They don't seem to have discovered ebooks.

Gutenberg have a base format(s) and auto converted other formats which is why they won't fix TOC/formatting stuff in most actual ebooks they offer. Fix it and re-offer it here?
Their unenforceable licence is also a bit mad.

OTOH, The Internet Archive / Library of Alexandra really only has scans and they are not as fussy as anyone else on copyright. All their ebooks seem to be the OCR from the TIFF or PDF with no proofing. The Gutenberg proofing is mostly OK.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Started in 1972, the base format is supposed to outlast fashions such as mobi, azw3, epub2, epub3 etc.

Yeah, as I mentioned, their raw output is just not for me, though I am glad they exist.

[SpicyPoison]

Originally Posted by twowheels

That sounds like a lot of work, time that could be spent reading the books.

No, i didn't edited 400+ in a day or 2.
It took me some time. But I spent more time reading books too.

[maddz]

I guess it's time well spent, if the formatting is so atrocious as to make reading hard going. Mind you, I find books hard going if the story-telling is weak, the characters un-relatable, and the world-building contradicts itself, but there's nothing a reader can do about any of those issues.

[Sirtel]

I also consider it time well-spent. I'm fussy and can't just ignore formatting that's not to my taste; I feel frustrated and can't focus. I also don't want to rely on any one app or device to do my formatting for me (e.g. KOReader) - that would mean I'd be chained to the said app/device, so to speak, and what if it stopped functioning some day, or I wanted a device my favorite app couldn't be installed on? I want my books to be app/device-agnostic as much as possible. So I edit them.

[Renate]

To anybody who was interested in that Shakespeare with the cleaned-up TOC...
It's here: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...28#post4423228

[Kindleing]

Originally Posted by Renate

To anybody who was interested in that Shakespeare with the cleaned-up TOC...
It's here: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...28#post4423228

Thanks.

[Barty]

Don't need to any more. I modded Plato to allow me to force style and formatting on the fly. (I think you can do this with koreader, too, but koreader is a bit too busy for my taste.)

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by Barty

Don't need to any more. I modded Plato to allow me to force style and formatting on the fly. (I think you can do this with koreader, too, but koreader is a bit too busy for my taste.)

Yes, you can, if you want to be dependent on a specific app. I don't; I want to be free to buy whatever device might catch my fancy, regardless of its OS, jailbreakability, whether KOReader or whichever other app can be installed on it and so on.

Besides, I hate fiddling with the settings on the device and don't want to do it every time I open a new book. I edit my books whenever I'm in the mood for tinkering, and only load pre-edited books on my Kobos; when I switch on my Kobo to read, I don't want to even touch the settings or think about the formatting, I want to just open a book and read.

YMMV, of course.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Yes, you can, if you want to be dependent on a specific app. I don't; I want to be free to buy whatever device might catch my fancy, regardless of its OS, jailbreakability, whether KOReader or whichever other app can be installed on it and so on.

Besides, I hate fiddling with the settings on the device and don't want to do it every time I open a new book. I edit my books whenever I'm in the mood for tinkering, and only load pre-edited books on my Kobos; when I switch on my Kobo to read, I don't want to even touch the settings or think about the formatting, I want to just open a book and read.

YMMV, of course.

Agree all of that. Plus if you want to re-read, or it's PD, then it's better to fix it.

Often if the book can't be read with a regular app/built-in reader then it needs fixing anyway and will be less than ideal in a app that allows overrides.

Fixing in Calibre can be faster than finding a fiddly setting!