I appreciate the heck out of the Gutenberg project but holy crap they need to invest some resources into putting 1/5 of the amount of effort Standard Ebooks puts into making every single one of their releases look and function so well in the real ebook reading scenarios of actual people
Honestly if the Gutenberg project had such a program for improving the formatting of their collection I would actually strongly consider volunteering some time towards it. Just like how I would not mind reading for Librivox
Project Gutenberg has around 50 times more than Standard Ebooks (~75 000 vs. ~1 400) and in a lot of different languages, Standard Ebooks only cares about English. Putting only 1/5 of the amount of work into it would be a drop in the bucket.
Edit: In general I agree, it’s hard to figure out how to contribute to Project Gutenberg.
My thinking was they need to do a project like Wikimedia’s Wiki Loves Momuments, where you put some banners up for a month out of the year, see if you can get donors to put up some money to reward people who do a good job at cleaning up some of the texts they have, and just make it an event about it to try to draw in new contributors, and of course some might end up sticking around after the event and continue contributing
I appreciate the heck out of the Gutenberg project but holy crap they need to invest some resources into putting 1/5 of the amount of effort Standard Ebooks puts into making every single one of their releases look and function so well in the real ebook reading scenarios of actual people
Honestly if the Gutenberg project had such a program for improving the formatting of their collection I would actually strongly consider volunteering some time towards it. Just like how I would not mind reading for Librivox
Project Gutenberg has around 50 times more than Standard Ebooks (~75 000 vs. ~1 400) and in a lot of different languages, Standard Ebooks only cares about English. Putting only 1/5 of the amount of work into it would be a drop in the bucket.
Edit: In general I agree, it’s hard to figure out how to contribute to Project Gutenberg.
I bet the top ten percent of titles on Gutenberg make up 90% of downloads.
My thinking was they need to do a project like Wikimedia’s Wiki Loves Momuments, where you put some banners up for a month out of the year, see if you can get donors to put up some money to reward people who do a good job at cleaning up some of the texts they have, and just make it an event about it to try to draw in new contributors, and of course some might end up sticking around after the event and continue contributing