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Comment by wharvle | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, any edition of a book that's "updating" modern English loses me, including messing with capitalization. Not interested. I love the formatting on Standard Ebooks, but they're no use to me if they're "updating" language, aside from things like repairing typesetting and formatting lost or mangled in PG editions.

Agree on notes in print, side notes (on very-wide editions) are best, then foot, then end of chapter endnotes. Full end-of-work endnotes are awful. Maybe they're better in ebooks, than footnotes, though? E-readers' poor UX for not-even-that-advanced features of books is part of why I barely use them, and practically never for any work that'd have notes of any sort.

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As someone who regularly compares different scans of old books, I counter: for centuries it’s already been common practice for publishers to update spellings, recapitalize, and even make more drastic changes. You just never noticed because print books don’t have a public commit log.

In the case of Standard Ebooks, “sound‐alike” changes are allowed (so spelling and capitalization changes are allowed when they make sense). Censorship, and even innocuous grammatical changes, are not. Despite generally appreciating old works in their own context, I find the tradeoff in readability for such a widespread practice to be worth it given how minor SE’s alterations are.

Sometimes capitalisation matters are close to purely stylistic, but other times they really are part of the content, guiding pronunciation or emphasis, so that lowercasing them harms the work. What is your opinion of my assessment in the above comment of some of the specific changes in <https://github.com/standardebooks/charles-dickens_a-christma...>?

I haven’t looked into your example, but certainly it can be true that lowercasing can be harmful. It goes without saying, I think, that the SE policy is only to lowercase words when doing so doesn’t harm.

When I see erroneous changes in SE books, I argue to revert, and have generally been successful. In my experience it’s drama‐free, like fixing any other typo.

The problem is when irregular spelling is intended to capture a vernacular. It does a disservice to everyone, erasing the author's intent with homogenized language.

If the spelling is intended to be vernacular, the SE policy is not to change the spelling. I (a mere reader) have successfully reverted dialectal spellings in SE several times.

Editorial commits are all marked as such and contain no non-editorial changes. The tools for compiling ebook files are available at https://github.com/standardebooks/tools, so creating your own versions with only the work you're interested in is straightforward (and can be at least partially automated).

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