I am currently sick, so I do not have the brain power to write anything particularly technical. I think I have some sort of subtype of influenza A. I do however have the capacity to talk about ebooks.

I like ebooks for a variety of reasons. One big one is that you can easily download one, try it, and then decide to read another if you don’t like the style of prose in it or the narrative. I usually read older books, mostly out of the superstition that time operates like a sieve in terms of quality of books. I usually (probably falsely) believe that books that stick around are more likely to be decent to read than newer ones if chosen at random. I’m also really not a fan of genres like self-help, popular science, romance and fantasy. There’s no objective reason to prefer other genres over those ones, but my preference usually means a lot of the books I find in a bookstore aren’t really my vibe.

As a result, I’ve been a big fan of Project Gutenberg, which is a wonderful project to take out of copyright books and then turn them into all manner of formats. There are a lot of books available here. One caveat is that the books available must be out of US copyright, which expire 70 years after the author’s death or 95 years after publication. Canada has approximately the same rules.

My one issue (and this is barely an issue) with Project Gutenberg though, is that sometimes the ebooks don’t display super nicely on my e-reader. There are also matters of whether the ebook is in a modern format. Some of the books in Project Gutenberg were digitized long enough ago that UTF-8 wasn’t in popular usage at the time.

I found a very cool project called Standard Ebooks, which has a consistent style guide. I know it’s one thing to say “consistent”, but trust me when I say it’s consistent. I’ve been going through converting Imperium in Imperio by Sutton E. Griggs into a book, and there have been plenty of things I needed to modify.

Overall, the tooling is really nice. It’s maybe a bit more technical than normal, but it’s enough that a software guy like me feels right at home.

If you want to read an ebook and it’s old enough to have an expired copyright, I thoroughly encourage you to look at Standard Ebooks. (It’s also a good idea to donate if you have some money laying around.) The books are free as in beer and free as in free speech. You also have a full idea of what went into modernizing any individual book, since the changes are available via the git repos holding the corresponding source for the book.