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Got some time to burn away? Interested in reading? If you find yourself agreeing with those two propositions, you might be a good candidate for Distributed Proofreaders which turns public domain books into versatile and compact ebooks. The OCR'd* pages of the books are first proofread because the machine still makes some mistakes and then formatted to all kind of layouts. If you're willing to give the process a try, here's a live demo. (no registration required) Distributed Proofreaders has preserved more than 29,000 books!
I think this is a wonderful way to spend some time and find interesting books while at the same time doing something useful. Also, no technical skills are required.
* Optical Character Recognition, a process of turning a scanned image of text into actual text
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 10 2015, @05:28PM
Many of which have been contributed by the Distributed Proofreaders project. That's where the books go after they've been proofread.
(Score: 5, Funny) by darkfeline on Friday April 10 2015, @05:59PM
Do books go to Valhalla if the proofreaders/OCR don't make it in time?
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 1) by t-3 on Friday April 10 2015, @06:04PM
I can't believe this info wasn't put in the summary. I've rarely ever heard DP mentioned except as a source for Gutenberg.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 11 2015, @02:54AM
Indeed. I procrastinated in college doing this for maybe a few weeks before I moved on. The other volunteers were really nice though.
One interesting thing is that DP policy is to not correct printing errors, so if there is an error in your Gutenberg e-book, well, it was printed that way.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday April 11 2015, @08:20AM
Either that, or the proofreaders missed it. Even the most careful proofreader will overlook a mistake every now and then.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2, Informative) by johnlenin1 on Monday April 13 2015, @01:52AM
It's been a while since I did any proofreading with DP, so they may have changed...but I believe the proofreading of multiple proofreaders was required and compared, and any discrepancies resolved, before a book was sent on to Gutenberg. That way errors introduced would ideally get caught and fixed.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday April 13 2015, @07:31PM
Multiple proofreaders considerably reduce the probability of errors slipping through, but only infinitely many proofreaders would reduce it to zero.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday April 11 2015, @05:12PM
Yeah, I've done a little DP work, and one of the instructions is you don't change the text. It's about preservation, not editing.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.