And now for something completely different...
One of my interests is promoting out-of-copyright (aka Public Domain) works. There is a great deal of truly excellent knowledge and fiction out there, just waiting for people to engage with it - but I don't believe that just providing a simple text file is enough. The texts and works deserve best-available presentation - and in today's world, even bibliophiles react better to outstanding editions.
The project that I help out with is Standard EBooks which provides free, high-quality electronic editions that are formatted and typeset to professional standards. There are thousands of titles available - including Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolstoy, Brontë, Shelley, and so many more. We release new books every month - just for the month of June 2026 we released works by authors such as PG Wodehouse, Alexandre Dumas, Joseph Conrad, Anthony Trollope, Dornford Yates, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Most of the works are fiction, but we also have many non-fiction titles available.
The entire toolchain is made available as open-source software so that anyone can produce their own ebooks using it.
As an aside - one of my early disgruntlements with the English language was our unnecessary overloading of the concepts of "gratis" and "libre" with the single English word "free".
It is true that "libre" can imply "gratis" - for example, if you are unfortunate enough to live in a capitalist society, then a public-spirited person can always supply what is "libre" at zero cost, i.e. "gratis".
However, in general the two concepts are not necessarily connected - one may receive gratis something that is not libre and vice versa.
The software development community sometimes uses the phrases "Free as in Beer" and "Free as in Speech" in place of "gratis" and "libre" - and sometimes extends this to include "Free as in Puppy", to indicate that one is accepting an obligation and ongoing costs along with the lovely pup.
Related to this is the issue of fixed costs - if someone gives me a vat of free wine, then in order for it to be useful some outlay is still required. This is essentially the question of "who pays for the bottling and labeling costs?"
However, while this is indeed an issue for physical goods, the equation changes considerably for information, because the cost of producing copies of an existing work is zero. The costs reduce to that of producing one high-quality master copy that is then endlessly duplicated.
This therefore brings up the question of what costs are involved in the production of the "master copy" (especially since we are explicitly aiming for high-quality products). In this case, to produce these editions, two projects form the majority of the pipeline:
- Project Gutenberg provides the scanned text of out-of-copyright works. They have been doing this for over 20 years and are extremely good at it.
- The Standard EBooks project takes already-sourced text and produces high-quality digital editions that are both gratis and libre and which are created with fully open tools. Standard Ebooks is sustained by donations of money and time from members.
Since I started being involved with the Standard EBooks project, I have helped to fund the production costs of several titles - including "The Revolt of the Angels" by Anatoly France and "On The Art of Writing" by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (the work from which the writer's advice: "Kill Your Darlings" is taken). I also have a new project underway - but more on that later when I'm ready to announce it properly.
Finally, while we're on the subject of books, my new book Java in a Nutshell, 9th Edition is off to Production - it should be hitting the shelves in September. All chapters are now available as part of the Early Release.
