Standard E-Books
If you're a big ereader user, you might already know about Standard E-Books, a website which creates immaculately typeset and edited digital editions of public-domain books.
The site employs a staff of part time editors who put together completely open editions of public-domain texts. Project Gutenberg is great, but the ebooks available for download there really, really suck. There's also a woman named Anna with an archive... you may have heard of her... and not everything there is great, either. Standard E-Books are formatted nicely, come with a proper and functional cover, and are distributed in multiple formats for compatibility with a whole bunch of platforms and devices. They're very nice!! Also, you can just read the books online, in your web browser! Extremely convenient!!
I am a minor-league data hoarder, and I've been filling the NAS we set up last year with all sorts of PDFs I've collected over the years - mostly style guides from old TV shows and movies, videogame design documents, entertainment pitches of various types, and so on. I recently started using Thorium, an open-source epub reader, to read the documentation for ink, which I have as an epub... and this then inspired me to start hoarding a bunch of epubs in addition to my PDFs. I immediately headed over to Standard E-Books to grab some of the ones I was sure I would always value having a good copy of.
Of course, there's so much stuff there that I immediately started grabbing books I have not read yet, too - in particular, a lot of French crime fiction, which is somewhat relevant to a project I plan to work on this year.
If I'm counting right, there seem to be nearly 1400 books on the site at time of writing. Astonishing!! I appreciated this interview with the project's founder about the process they go through to create the books - each is handled by an individual worker who is overseen by an editor and must cross-check the text constantly with various page scans of old editions.
And of course, all of this reminds me that I need to check the list of new shit in the public domain and see if anything new dropped this year that I like...