Slashdot Mirror
Just One Page a Day
Charles Franks writes "Two years ago I started building an online proofreading system as a way to help Project Gutenberg (PG) get more books online: Distributed Proofreaders (DP). The concept is simple, we scan books and load the image and OCR output for each page into the online system. Next, proofreaders compare the OCR text to the image making any corrections as necessary, each page gets looked at twice. Finally the output from the site is massaged into a PG e-text and submitted to PG for posting to the archive. Now, nearly 600 books and a lot of PHP code later, we have snuggled into our new home which is graciously provided by the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg. Now that we have 'real' resources available to us (the original site ran on a Pentium 200 over my 128kbps upstream cablemodem) I would like to invite the online community at large to help us put even more books online. To this end I would like to ask everyone to do 'Just One Page a Day'. Thank you, Charles Franks"
Looking at the books listed on their site, it seems to me that most of these books are probably public domain books or books that have an expired copyright. I wonder if they'll ever get around to transcribing copyrighted works? I know for a fact that there are a lot of digital copies of copyrighted works such as Frank Herbert's Dune series and The Lord of the Rings floating around the Net and I think the newsgroups as well.
Isn't this illegal? Aren't there copyright laws to putting books online without permission?
You'll find that on Project GNUtenberg.
"And like that