Monarchy 5.1 e-Press

21st century formats for 19th century books about 17th century history

Jun. 28, 2024: The first two chapters of History vol. VIII are available.

This project republishes various books about the history of 17th century Britain. Though these books are significant for the study of the period, they have long ago fallen out of print.

Since these works have entered the public domain, scanned copies are available online, thanks to the Internet Archive. Unfortunately, the results of automated scanning are slightly lacking in quality. The scans are photographs of each page, faithfully reproducing every marginal scribble and damaged type. They lack the advantages of e-book technology, such as searchable text, convenient tables of contents, and adjustable font size. On less capable devices, there are delays when loading and scrolling.

Some scanning projects have recovered books’ text using optical character recognition, but at best, the results suffer from poor formatting. The conversion cannot separate normal text from footnotes. Links and other e-book features are hard to add correctly. Often, large sections of the page come out as gibberish.

Photographic copying treats a book as a set of page images. OCR treats it as a stream of letters. But a book is in fact structured text, made of chapters, paragraphs, page headings, references, illustrations, and more. To accurately display a book in a modern electronic format, a publisher must capture the structure of all these elements and typeset them correctly.

Technology is not yet able to automatically produce quality e-book reprints, but manual editing and careful proofreading can fill the gap. This project’s goal is to accurately represent both books’ text and their structure in the DocBook semantic markup language. This allows easy conversion to current formats and provides compatibility with future ones, taking advantage of all the features they offer.

Of these formats, EPUB books are often the most convenient to read, and are compatible with many e-readers. The basic EPUB files use fewer features, for compatibility with less capable software. PDF should work on the widest variety of devices. If you plan to print and bind the books, use the double-sided PDF. The source distribution contains the DocBook files used to build all the other formats. Download it if you want to change anything.

The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution

Editor: Samuel Rawson Gardiner

This is a collection of primary sources relating to constitutional law.

Status: complete text, minor formatting remaining to do.

Download: EPUB PDF Double-sided PDF Source

Read online

History of England, 1603–1642

Author: Samuel Rawson Gardiner

The classic history of the period. It will take some time for the complete work to appear here.

Source

About

“Monarchy 5.1” is a play on the Fifth Monarchy movement, as well as the DocBook format, which is at version 5.1.