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Distributed Proofreaders: Preserving History One Page at a Time

posted by cmn32480 on Friday April 10 2015, @04:15PM   Printer-friendly
from the i-see-said-the-blind-man dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

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

 
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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday April 11 2015, @08:20AM

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Saturday April 11 2015, @08:20AM (#168922) Journal

    so if there is an error in your Gutenberg e-book, well, it was printed that way.

    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.
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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by johnlenin1 on Monday April 13 2015, @01:52AM

    by johnlenin1 (707) on Monday April 13 2015, @01:52AM (#169496)

    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

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Monday April 13 2015, @07:31PM (#169929) Journal

      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.