Finding the "right" ebook on e.g. Gutenberg
If you buy an ebook from Amazon or another shop, you get a file with (hopefully?) proper quality and that’s it.
But as someone reading older books, Project Gutenberg seems overwhelming. I tried to find all Sherlock Holmes novels to put on my Kindle (using KOreader). But for each novel you can find multiple different files (only counting the epubs) which apparently differ in many ways. Might be the edition of the book, collections, books with or without illustrations, books having proper chapter marks or not, …
How do you deal with this? Is there some „proper“ way to find the ideal file for me?
The same might of course apply to other epub sources, being a very frustrating experience.
Check standardebooks.org
They curate some of Gutenberg's collection to make a better user experience with a single nice version.
Wow, this looks just like what needed. Thanks!
I can not give you a specific answer regarding Gutenberg and Sherlock Holmes. However, this is my more general take on it, if you don't mind.
The usability often drops when users get more (too many) choices.
It makes me think of Blackberry vs New age phones. Blackberry had 1 calculator. It worked perfectly. It had 1 place where you could jot down your notes. It was all working perfectly. Then people needed/wanted appstores. So nowadays when you open an appstore to install an app (OS app is not good or not installed), you get overwhelmed and have to choose between 20 calculators, 20 notes apps, 20 flashlight apps.. . It is making people lose their time and patience with something that should just be very simple (and was very simple at one point).
I hope Gutenberg can indeed polish things up and make the user experience better. Facing somewhat similar issues compared to linux. Where at one point the user experience becomes very important, and steps should be taken to improve it.
It’s not really in the scope of Gutenberg to “polish things up”. Gutenberg is a repository where every edition of every book ever published will be stored in machine-readable form, reproducing the original typesetting as faithfully as possible. It’s not for Gutenberg to curate.
Fortunately there are other projects such as Standard Ebooks that build on the Gutenberg holdings and introduce curation and consistent formatting.
this is the same with breakfast cereal fir example, and it gives people they have an illusion of choice.
That said, lots of apple users refuse to download Signal, so there is that :)