For several years I've known about the Standard Ebooks project, which makes high quality renditions of public domain books. Until now I haven't had a chance to read any ebooks; however I recently acquired a [Kobo Clara BW], and decided to try making one.

The two most important references during this process are the step by step instructions and the manual of style. The latter in particular is incredibly detailed (and perhaps intimidating), so I recommend skimming through it once and then returning to read a section in detail when needed. At first the instructions seem very intimidating, especially some of the more baroque CSS annotations. However, the entire process is explained extremely well, and with a little bit experimentation everything falls into place quite nicely.

The first step is to select a book for production. Standard Ebooks will only produce books that are clearly in the public domain in the United States, which at the moment means all books published up to 1929. The easiest way to find a public domain book is Project Gutenberg. The wanted list if you don't have anything in particular in mind.

After a little bit of searching I settled on The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism by Betrand Russell. Russell was a logician, and I have always been curious about communism and the Russian Revolution, so it seemed like a natural fit.

The next step is to find page scans of the original book. Unfortunately Project Gutenberg doesn't link to which scans they used, so you'll have to do some digging on Internet Archive or HathiTrust.

Once you've found a transcription and page scans, propose your project on the mailing list. (Don't worry, everyone is very friendly, and even if you aren't

An invaluable resource during this process is another ebook that you can use as a template for the structure of the XHTML (in my case, Roads to Freedom also by Bertrand Russell served nicely). The instructions also recommend doing a git commit after each step, which is invaluable for reviewing your changes (and possibly reverting them).

Installation of se tools.

pipx install

se create-draft --author "Bertrand Russell" --title "The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism" --pg-id 17350

This command creates a skeleton ebook and extracts the Gutenberg Project transcription into one large body.xhtml document, which was full of confusing HTML and CSS. The first step is to remove all of that cruft and only leave behind the main text (don't worry if the result isn't valid XML).

The next step is to split up the monolithic body file into chapters. I extracted the preface manually, and then added the <!--se:split--> at the start of each chapter. With that, se split-file body.xhtml chops up the file into individual chapters, and an application of se clean . will format all the files nicely.

At this point I deviate from the step-by-step guide slightly and update the chapter titles and create the endnotes first. The chapter titles are [https://standardebooks.org/manual/latest/7-high-level-structural-patterns#7.2]. Endnotes are described in great detail in the Manual of Style, but this is another case where I recommend looking at an existing ebook as an example. Once this is done I do another scan through the book, and all remaining vestiges of the Project Gutenberg CSS should now be gone.

Now we get into the fun bit,

• se typogriphy .

• se semanticate .

• se modernize-spelling .

• se lint . - This prints out

Add local.css (mention that)

Now we proofread! This can be done using foliate, a very designed ebook reader for Linux. Ctrl-R to reload.

I cannot share the hopes of the Bolsheviks any more than those of the Egyptian anchorites; I regard both as tragic delusions, destined to bring upon the world centuries of darkness and futile violence.

Friends of Russia here think of the dictatorship of the proletariat as merely a new form of representative government, in which only working men and women have votes, and the constituencies are partly occupational, not geographical. They think that “proletariat” means “proletariat,” but “dictatorship” does not quite mean “dictatorship.” This is the opposite of the truth. When a Russian Communist speaks of dictatorship, he means the word literally, but when he speaks of the proletariat, he means the word in a Pickwickian sense. He means the “class-conscious” part of the proletariat, i.e., the Communist Party. He includes people by no means proletarian (such as Lenin and Chicherin) who have the right opinions, and he excludes such wage-earners as have not the right opinions, whom he classifies as lackeys of the bourgeoisie.

It is possible that scientific intelligence may, in time, reach the point when it will enable rivalry to exterminate the human race. This is the most hopeful method of bringing about an end of war.

It makes it possible to suppose that, if Russia is allowed to have peace, an amazing industrial development may take place, making Russia a rival of the United States. The Bolsheviks are industrialists in all their aims; they love everything in modern industry except the excessive rewards of the capitalists. And the harsh discipline to which they are subjecting the workers is calculated, if anything can, to give them the habits of industry and honesty which have hitherto been lacking, and the lack of which alone prevents Russia from being one of the foremost industrial countries.

It is also possible, having acquired power, to use it for one’s own ends instead of for the people. This is what I believe to be likely to happen in Russia: the establishment of a bureaucratic aristocracy, concentrating authority in its own hands, and creating a regime just as oppressive and cruel as that of capitalism. Marxians never sufficiently recognize that love of power is quite as strong a motive, and quite as great a source of injustice, as love of money; yet this must be obvious to any unbiased student of politics. It is also obvious that the method of violent revolution leading to a minority dictatorship is one peculiarly calculated to create habits of despotism which would survive the crisis by which they were generated.

All in all a very fun experience, and I will definitely be doing more :)

TODO

gthumb - First crop to a 2:3 aspect ratio, and then resize to 1400x2100.

https://groups.google.com/g/standardebooks

https://rusmuseumvrm.ru/data/collections/painting/19_20/zh_4056/?lang=en

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Savitsky#/media/File:Konstantin_Apollonowitsch_Sawizkij_001.jpg

Pictures Labor Work Forge/Smith Industry Factory Brick Cotton Farmer Ship Mill Build Bolshevism Lenin Revolution

• peasant
• poor
• Jean-François Millet

https://www.si.edu/object/industry:saam_1983.90.217 https://www.si.edu/object/madrid-coal-mine-new-mexico:saam_1964.1.166 https://www.si.edu/object/industry:saam_1964.1.92 https://www.si.edu/object/blockmaker:saam_1912.2.1