I made a thing…
I’m a huge fan of the Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore (hat tip to Marianna Khumri’s Facebook-avoidant husband). It has been a source of frustration that his work is hard to find. The Ebooks that are available are all direct Gutenberg transfers rife with errors, terrible formatting, and a total lack of care. It makes it very hard to share this beautiful work with people I think might enjoy it. This is something I’ve wanted to fix for a long time.
Then last week I caught wind of the Standard Ebooks project. This is like a hobby custom tailored for me: a mashup of programming, markup, open source, and the public domain. I hooked up with the Standard Ebooks folks and as my first production (hopefully of many), using their platform, we produced a really beautiful ebook version of Tagore’s Gitanjali with quality typography, subject-appropriate cover art, and careful editing. And of course it is entirely free in both senses of the word.
This makes me very very happy. If you love beautiful lyrical moving poetry OR if you have an e-reader and believe information was meant to be free, check it out! (And of course if you spot any problems with the book let me know or fork the repo and submit a pull request 🤓)