Donate to Standard Ebooks

and help bring the beauty of literature to the digital world

An oil painting of a women reading a book by a writing desk at twilight.

We work hard to create beautifully-formatted ebooks that are free of cost and free of copyright restrictions. It takes a team of highly-skilled specialists working together for weeks and even months to ensure that an ebook meets our exacting aesthetic and technical standards, before it’s offered to readers for free.

The cost of producing even the most basic ebook is estimated to start at several hundred dollars; and that doesn’t include infrastructure costs like developing and maintaining our free and open source ebook production toolset, editing our free Manual of Style, project management, hosting, or bandwidth. This means your financial contribution is critically important for us to continue bringing beautifully-presented literature to readers in the digital age.

Fractured Atlas, a 501(c)(3) public charity, is our fiscal sponsor. Your donation will be processed through their website, and their name will appear on your financial statements and receipts. Donations are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.

Make a one-time donation Make a recurring donation

Join our supporter circles

Join the Letters Circle

Your name will be listed as a Letters Circle donor on our masthead for one year with a one-time donation, or for the duration of your monthly donation.

Start a $5/month donation — or — Make a $50 donation

Join the Friends Circle

Your name and a small photograph will be listed as a Friends Circle donor on our masthead for one year with a one-time donation, or for the duration of your monthly donation.

Start a $10/month donation — or — Make a $100 donation

Join the Patrons Circle

Your name and a medium photograph will be listed as a Patrons Circle donor on our masthead for one year with a one-time donation, or for the duration of your monthly donation.

Start a $15/month donation — or — Make a $150 donation

Sponsor an ebook of your choice

Is there a book you want to see made into a beautiful digital edition? You can give the gift of literature to readers everywhere by sponsoring an addition to the Standard Ebooks catalog.

Donate at one of the levels below and a book you select will be carefully hand-produced into an ebook edition that meets our high standard of quality, before becoming a permanent addition to our online catalog for the world to read, share, and reuse free of cost or U.S. copyright restrictions. Your name will appear in the ebook’s colophon and metadata, sealing your legacy as a sponsor of the literate arts.

Before you make your donation, contact the Editor-in-Chief to confirm that your ebook selection will be accepted at your chosen donation level. These are the general rules:

Your selection must meet our collections policy. The SE Editor-in-Chief reserves the right to modify or reject a selection for any reason.
Your selection must have a usable transcription available online, for example at Project Gutenberg or Wikisource. In general, Standard Ebooks doesn’t create new transcriptions or work with raw OCR output.
Your selection’s word count will be calculated from the source transcription using the SE toolset, and includes front and back matter like forewords and endnotes. Contact the Editor-in-Chief before donating so that we can calculate your selection’s word count for you; a word processor can give you an estimate, but we must make the final determination. Note that the final ebook’s word count will differ.
Standard Ebooks is the sole decisionmaker regarding all aspects of ebook editing and production. Trust us to create an artifact of beauty.

Your choice of ebook of fewer than 100,000 words (Like A Room With a View by E. M. Forster)	Make a $700 donation
Your choice of ebook of 100,000–150,000 words (Like A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens)	Make a $850 donation
Your choice of ebook of 150,000–200,000 words (Like Emma by Jane Austen)	Make a $1,000 donation
Your choice of ebook of 200,000–250,000 words (Like Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky)	Make a $1,150 donation
Your choice of ebook of 250,000–300,000 words (Like Ulysses by James Joyce)	Make a $1,300 donation