Not the GP, but I also have mixed feelings about Standard Ebooks. They modernise texts for American readers. This means changing the punctuation, merging some words, altering the syntax, etc.
When I read an old novel, written two centuries ago in England, the little differences to modern English are part of the charm, and I certainly don't want any Americanism mixed in. For one of my favorite novels, The Forsyte saga, the author deliberately used some rare forms of words, which SE replaced with the mainstream forms.
SE editor in chief here. What you describe is incorrect. The only thing we do is very light sound-alike spelling modernization, like "to-night" -> "tonight". We do not do things like change from en-GB to en-US, replace old words with different modern words, or change text for "American readers", whatever that means. I have no idea where you got that impression.
I personally worked on the Forsyte saga. If you think something was done in error, please let us know and we'll be happy to fix it.
You may already be aware, but SE marks all commits making those kinds of changes as '[Editorial]', so it is generally trivial to use their tooling to build your own high-quality ebook without any of the editorial changes.
When I tried this in the past, it was non-trivial because the editorial changes are mixed with the technical changes. Reverting the editorial changes broke the technical changes.
Not parent, but while I can appreciate your viewpoint, I would like to point out that many many many books have abridged, reworded, simplified, or disambiguated versions for different audiences.
The Bible is I daresay the most famous of these. Translations aside, even the English versions have had significant alterations done to wording, spelling, and meaning depending on the version.
There's also the Great Illustrated Classics imprint for certain classic novels like H.G. Wells's The Invisible Man. (I read that one like 10 times as a kid and it's what got me into sci-fi as a whole I'd argue. Haha.)
Whether these alternate versions are good or bad is obviously up for debate and depends on the person, but I'm just saying that what SE does is hardly new in the publishing world.
When I read an old novel, written two centuries ago in England, the little differences to modern English are part of the charm, and I certainly don't want any Americanism mixed in. For one of my favorite novels, The Forsyte saga, the author deliberately used some rare forms of words, which SE replaced with the mainstream forms.