Standard eBooks is looking for supporters

[ownedbycats]

A lot of websites also fail when you look at them in old browsers.

[JSWolf]

In the main CSS, if you delete everything that starts with an @ you then get it so ADE does not throw out the CSS. It;s that easy. Yet they won't fix it.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

A lot of websites also fail when you look at them in old browsers.

Quite a few are broken in modern browsers if the Browser isn't Chromium based (Edge, Chrome and others). MS Site works on my non-Chromium browser even though it claims I need Edge.

I think websites are often worse than Standard Books. I've not had a problem with their standard epub on a Kobo, even thought they claim it's not for Kobos and like Jon disparage the common version of ADE, but that doesn't bother me. They offer more choice of Format than Amazon or Kobo and often better formatted than ebooks from either. It seems on average the medium or niche publishers on Amazon, Kobo and Google are better than SP or big guys.

Also you can quickly change anything not to taste in Calibre. Gutenberg is often weird and Internet Archive's Kindle & epub formats are mostly useless, being un-proofed bad OCRs. Only their PDFs are worth downloading.

See also Global Grey eBooks for better than average PD.

[salamanderjuice]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

In the main CSS, if you delete everything that starts with an @ you then get it so ADE does not throw out the CSS. It;s that easy. Yet they won't fix it.

All this HTML/CSS/Unicode nonsense just makes it hard to read on my Commodore 64 too. For some reason they just ignore my letters asking them to please just offer up a plain ASCII text file on a 5.25" floppy.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by salamanderjuice

… makes it hard to read on my Commodore 64 too. For some reason they just ignore my letters asking them to please just offer up a plain ASCII text file on a 5.25" floppy.

Cassette surely.

[twowheels]

Originally Posted by Quoth

See also Global Grey eBooks for better than average PD.

Wow, first I've heard of this site. It has some really interesting books that I've not seen elsewhere. Thanks for sharing!

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by twowheels

Wow, first I've heard of this site. It has some really interesting books that I've not seen elsewhere. Thanks for sharing!

You do know about Gutenberg and depending your local copyright rules, Fadedpage?

There are also different country specific Gutenberg sites.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The CCS fails when viewed with an older version of ADE.

Exactly which version of which book's css is failing on which device (assuming that you're not using a version that's not recommended for a particular device, of course)?

[salamanderjuice]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Cassette surely.

Nah, here in North America the floppy reined supreme.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

Standard Ebooks' output is better than some retail books I've seen.

Originally Posted by Quoth

It seems on average the medium or niche publishers on Amazon, Kobo and Google are better than SP or big guys.

Shout out to Open Road. Every book I've purchased from them is nicely formatted. No funky stuff. I wish other publishers would steal from them.

[SomeSteve]

The covers and the cover thumbnails of at least some of the "Compatible epubs," such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, don't display on some old readers (one besides the Nook, mentioned below, is a Sony). I thought the cause was the following error, which Calibre finds when you run a check in the editor:

The meta cover tag has content before name [epub/content.opf]

Some e-book readers such as the Nook fail to recognize covers if the content attribute comes before the name attribute. For maximum compatibility move the name attribute before the content attribute.

The code is

<meta content="cover.jpg" name="cover"/>

And maybe it is the cause. But if you have Calibre correct just this error, it still doesn't fix the problem. Converting epub ==> epub does, however, do the job.

Link to the book:

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ro...d-mr-hyde.epub

[MSWallack]

I was very interested in trying to work on some books for Standard eBooks but turned away because the tools are (were?) only available for Linux. That seems (seemed?) to be a somewhat strange and arbitrary limitation especially given that Linux has a smaller market share and userbase than Windows (and I'm not interested in a discussion of whether Windows or Linux is better; that isn't the point).

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The CCS fails when viewed with an older version of ADE. That is one of the problems. And there's no good reason this needs to happen with eBooks who's formatting is not complicated at all and all they need is a simple CSS.

ADE 2.0.1 is 10 years old yet you still hold it up as the gold standard for rendering ePubs.

Are you still using Internet Explorer to browse websites? Windows 8 on your computer?

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

In the main CSS, if you delete everything that starts with an @ you then get it so ADE does not throw out the CSS. It;s that easy. Yet they won't fix it.

So ADE is non-compliant. Perhaps you should check the ePub spec on just what should happen when an unknown element is found in a CSS stylesheet. Gentle hint: the answer is not to dump the entire stylesheet. Gentle hint 2: any unsupported properties must be gracefully degraded per the CSS 2.0 specification for ePub 2.0.1.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by SomeSteve

The covers and the cover thumbnails of at least some of the "Compatible epubs," such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, don't display on some old readers (one besides the Nook, mentioned below, is a Sony). I thought the cause was the following error, which Calibre finds when you run a check in the editor:



The code is



And maybe it is the cause. But if you have Calibre correct just this error, it still doesn't fix the problem. Converting epub ==> epub does, however, do the job.

Link to the book:

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ro...d-mr-hyde.epub

And calibre's check (I assume you mean the ladybug icon) is pretty much useless. Epubcheck 5.0 does not find any errors.