---
source_url: "https://www.openculture.com/2017/06/free-ebooks-with-modern-typography-nice-formatting-all-carefully-produced-for-the-true-book-lover.html"
title: "Free eBooks with Modern Typography & Nice Formatting, All \"Carefully Produced for the True Book Lover\" | Open Culture"
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> **Original source:** https://www.openculture.com/2017/06/free-ebooks-with-modern-typography-nice-formatting-all-carefully-produced-for-the-true-book-lover.html

in _e-books, [Literature](https://www.openculture.com/category/literature)_ | June 21st, 2017 [1 Comment](https://www.openculture.com/2017/06/free-ebooks-with-modern-typography-nice-formatting-all-carefully-produced-for-the-true-book-lover.html#comments)

![](https://cdn8.openculture.com/2017/06/20215647/standard-ebooks-e1498021022352.png)If you look through our col­lec­tion of [800+ Free eBooks](http://www.openculture.com/free_ebooks), you will find many pub­lic domain texts pre­sent­ed by providers like [Project Guten­berg](https://www.gutenberg.org/) and [Archive.org](https://archive.org/details/texts). Pret­ty soon, we’ll have to add texts from [Stan­dard eBooks](https://standardebooks.org/), a vol­un­teer-dri­ven project that dig­i­tizes books while plac­ing an empha­sis on design and typog­ra­phy. Here’s how they describe their mis­sion:

> While there are plen­ty of places where you can down­load free and accu­rate­ly-tran­scribed pub­lic domain ebooks, we feel the _qual­i­ty_ of those ebooks can often be great­ly improved.
> 
> For exam­ple, [Project Guten­berg](https://gutenberg.org/), a major pro­duc­er of pub­lic-domain ebooks, hosts epub and Kin­dle files that some­times lack basic typo­graph­ic neces­si­ties like curly quotes; some of those ebooks are auto­mat­i­cal­ly gen­er­at­ed and can’t take full advan­tage of mod­ern eread­er tech­nol­o­gy like pop­up foot­notes or pop­up tables of con­tents; they some­times lack niceties like cov­er images and title pages; and the qual­i­ty of indi­vid­ual ebook pro­duc­tions varies great­ly.
> 
> Archival sites like the [Inter­net Archive](https://archive.org/) (and even Project Guten­berg, to some extent) painstak­ing­ly pre­serve entire texts word-for-word, includ­ing orig­i­nal typos and ephemera that are of lim­it­ed inter­est to mod­ern read­ers: every­thing includ­ing cen­turies-old pub­lish­ing marks, adver­tise­ments for long-van­ished pub­lish­ers, author bios, deeply archa­ic spellings, and so on. Some­times all you get is a scan of the actu­al book pages. That’s great for researchers, archivists, and spe­cial-inter­est read­ers, but not that great for casu­al, mod­ern read­ers.
> 
> The Stan­dard Ebooks project dif­fers from those etext projects in that we aim to make free pub­lic domain ebooks that are care­ful­ly type­set, cleaned of ancient and irrel­e­vant ephemera, take full advan­tage of mod­ern eread­ing tech­nol­o­gy, are for­mat­ted accord­ing to a detailed style guide, and that are each held to a stan­dard of qual­i­ty and inter­nal con­sis­ten­cy. Stan­dard Ebooks include care­ful­ly cho­sen cov­er art based on pub­lic domain art­work, and are pre­sent­ed in an attrac­tive way on your ebook­shelf. For tech­ni­cal­ly-inclined read­ers, Stan­dard Ebooks con­form to a rig­or­ous cod­ing style, are com­plete­ly open source, and are [host­ed on Github](https://github.com/standardebooks/), so any­one can con­tribute cor­rec­tions or improve­ments eas­i­ly and direct­ly with­out hav­ing to deal with baroque forums or opaque process­es.

All of the ebooks in the [Stan­dard eBooks col­lec­tion](https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/) “are thought to be in the pub­lic domain in the Unit­ed States.” You can cur­rent­ly down­load 103 texts–for exam­ple titles like Jane Austen’s _[Pride and Prej­u­dice](https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/jane-austen/pride-and-prejudice)_, Mary Shel­ley’s _[Franken­stein](https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/mary-shelley/frankenstein)_, [short fic­tion by Philip K. Dick,](https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/philip-k-dick/short-fiction) and Niet­zsche’s [_Beyond_ Good and Evil](https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/friedrich-nietzsche/beyond-good-and-evil/helen-zimmern). (See [the full col­lec­tion here](https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/).) They offer ver­sions spe­cial­ly designed for the Kin­dle and Kobo, but also the more uni­ver­sal epub for­mat. If you’d like to pitch in and help [Stan­dard eBooks](https://standardebooks.org/) dig­i­tize more aes­thet­i­cal­ly-pleas­ing books, [get more infor­ma­tion here](https://standardebooks.org/contribute/).

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