books
Standard Ebooks
A small, carefully produced collection of about 900 public-domain ebooks, polished and formatted to a high standard, with an OPDS feed. You browse and download titles from its website. Reach for it when you want a clean, well-typeset edition of a classic rather than a raw scan.
No programmatic check, opens the archive’s own search.
Why it’s useful & how it works
Standard Ebooks fills a specific gap: it takes public-domain texts and reworks them into beautifully typeset, proofreading-corrected modern editions with consistent formatting and accurate metadata, unlike the sometimes rough scans on larger platforms. Each title is a hand-crafted edition, so the catalogue is small but every book in it meets a high editorial standard. Echo links you to the Standard Ebooks website, where you browse by author or subject and download directly in EPUB or compatible formats.
What’s inside
Over 1,400 carefully produced public-domain ebooks, curated for quality rather than quantity, with titles added steadily by volunteer editors.
API access
https://standardebooks.org/feeds/opds (OPDS/Atom)
What we measured
Our own probes, not the archive’s own claims. Re-run periodically; every reading below is dated.
Reachability
- Direct request
- Responded HTTP 200 412 ms
- Through a datacenter proxy
- Responded HTTP 200 639 ms
- API, direct
- Blocked HTTP 401 153 ms
- API, through a proxy
- Blocked HTTP 401 526 ms
Benchmark coverage
Found 5 of 8 test items (63%) in the Books cluster. Median response 133 ms.
By how well known the item is: 3/3 well-known, 1/3 mid, 1/2 obscure .
Reachability measured 2026-08-22. Benchmark run 2026-08-22.
Access
May be geo- or IP-blocked from some networks.