| Standard Ebooks | |
|---|---|
 Logo | |
| Location | United States |
| Established | 2015; 11 years ago (2015) |
| Collection | |
| Size | 1,374 books (26 January 2026) |
| Other information | |
| Website | standardebooks |
Standard Ebooks is anopen source, volunteer-driven project to create and publish high-quality, fully featured, and accessibleebooks of works in thepublic domain.[1][2] The project sources existing ebooks from sites likeProject Gutenberg and theInternet Archive, modernizing and proofreading them to adhere to a unifiedstyle guide.[1][3][4][5]
All Standard Ebooks titles are released inepub,azw3, andKepub formats, and are available throughGoogle Play Books andApple Books. All of the project's ebook files are released in the United States public domain, and all code is released under theGNU General Public License v3.
Standard Ebooks was founded by Alex Cabal after he experienced frustration at being unable to find well-formatted English-language ebooks while living in Germany.[6] After early experiments creating apay what you want edition ofAlice's Adventures in Wonderland,[7] the Standard Ebooks website was launched in 2017. Initial notice came from posts onHacker News andReddit,[8] with later mentions includingStack Overflow's newsletter.[9]
In 2021, Standard Ebooks began accepting donations and sponsorships to produce specific books.[10] In May 2024, Standard Ebooks publishedUlysses as its thousandth title.[11]
Standard Ebooks produces ebooks by following a unified style guide, which specifies everything from typography standards to semantic tagging and internal code structure, with the goal of creating a consistent corpus, aligned with modern publishing standards and "cleaned of ancient and irrelevant ephemera".[12] Standard Ebooks works with organizations such as the National Network for Equitable Library Service, and strives to conform toDAISY Consortium accessibility standards, among others, to ensure that all productions will work with modern tools such asscreen readers.[citation needed]
With the goal of making public domain works more accessible to modern audiences, archaic spellings are modernized and typographic quirks are addressed "so ebooks look like books and not text documents".[3] This approach stands in contrast to that of Project Gutenberg.[13]
All book covers are derived from public domain fine art. Volunteer ebook producers locate paintings suitable for the work they are producing.[citation needed]
