Distributed Proofreaders Posts 5,000th E-book

bbc writes "Distributed Proofreaders has posted its 5,000th ebook to Project Gutenberg. The book, a Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature, by John W. Cousin, was proofed for this special occasion by over 500 volunteers. Distributed Proofreaders is a project that distributes the otherwise gargantuan task of correcting scanning and recognition errors in an OCR'ed text. The project has thousands of volunteers, of which many hundreds are active on any given day. It is currently the main supplier of etexts for Project Gutenberg."

Comments

Exxcelent Werk

[andrewa]

I am prowd to bee won off thows prewf reeders

Re:Exxcelent Werk

[eingram]

Well, I ran your comment through Word's spelling and grammar checker, took the first suggestions, and cleaned it up for you.

I am prow to bee won off thaws prow readers.

I say we get rid of the volunteers, Word does a great job!

So....

[TheRedHorse]

....I guess the slashdot editors aren't members?

Wonderful

[Chasuk]

As I get older, reading texts on-screen gets easier. My vision is still 20/20, but I now require reading glasses, which are generally out of reach when I need them. Project Gutenberg has come in as a real lifesaver (well, sanity-saver) now that I'm turning into a geezer. That, and the price is perfect!

Re:Wonderful

[Anonymous Coward]

The price may be right, but donating is good too.

Hm!

[martingunnarsson]

They should offer their services to authors and magazines, and raise some money from what they do. It wouldn't be enough to split between the involved proof readers I guess, but the project itself could get some money to buy...well, whatever they might need. Perhaps they already do this, I'm too lazy to find out :-)

Re:Hm!

[FlipmodePlaya]

Sounds like a cool idea, and I'm not sure if they've done this either. I know that if I were sending a magazine out to a ~million readers, I would place great stock in my editing. The Distributed Proofreaders project probably wouldn't want to be held liable for the mistakes of volunteers, especially with the possibility of trolls.

Re:Hm!

[jonathan_ingram]

It's an interesting idea, but at the moment we're concentrating on providing proofreading services for Project Gutenberg. Every book which goes through the site has been scanned by one of our unpaid volunteers (except for those which have been, to use a slightly emotive term, 'raided' from sites that provide page images) -- and we already have enough books in our queue to keep us going for a year, even if we all stopped scanning immediately!

Also, we are very comfortable with being a provider of *public domain* material, and I think many members wouldn't feel comfortable moving into the copy-restricted domain.

Re:Hm!

[baegucb_18706]

Australia has a somewhat more favorable copywrite laws. Take a look at http://gutenberg.net.au/ which has some texts you can't download in the USA *wink*

Re:Hm!

[jonathan_ingram]

Yes, Australia is currently 'Life+50', which means that a work becomes copyright free 50 years after the death of the author (sadly, this will be changing to 'Life+70' soon). I live in the EU, which is 'Life+70'. There's a significant amount of material which is copyright free in the EU and Australia, but still copy restricted in the USA -- basically, anything published after 1922 by an author who died before 1934. We recently started a 'DPEU' to focus on these works. At the moment the focus is on Eastern European languages, but there's a wide variety of content (including some English material).

I need a new job

[jamoan]

Wear can I apply? i have excellent grammer skills.

Re:I need a new job

[jonathan_ingram]

Luckily, you do not need either grammar or spelling skills -- just the ability to match text against a source image. Indeed, it may even be an *advantage* to not be a great linguist! One of the key things we emphasise is that we want an exact copy of the source material -- we do not want people 'correcting' or 'updating' the originals to bring them into line with the way the language is written today.

Slow down!

[tod_miller]

I am still on the 4986th book, this one isn't that good, but I have to finish it, oh, page 34, line 7 there is a mistake in the 4th word, I think you know it, yes.

Other than this I just found, the other 4985 are AOK so far.

Good work guys. Free the books. ook.

(re-reading Sourcery on the commute today... ook oook)

500 people read it?

[tod_miller]

The book, a Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature, by John W. Cousin, was proofed for this special occasion by over 500 volunteers.

Hardly a non-put-downable... I suppose that is is a Biography (Shouldn't that be bibliography *chuckle*) of english literature is kinda symbolic.

I guess this more than doubles the total number of people who have read this book though!

I like Gutenberg, I hope they start a system where you can download copyright books for a micropayment, I would pay good money for text ebooks.

Lets hope ebooks don't go the way of music, keep the costs low, no DRM fluffing up the download. If you can click 3 times and start reading a new book, and it costs you euro's then you would preffer that than d/l gigs of warez.

Anyone who illegally downloads lots of books, tends to be the person who does't read them much anyway (Someone boasted to me that they had 300 O'Reilly books, squirming under the desire to tell me that they were eBooks, off irc, oh lawks, what a riot, I wish I was your friend, go away)

Re:500 people read it?

[wolfdvh]

I like Gutenberg, I hope they start a system where you can download copyright books for a micropayment, I would pay good money for text ebooks.

Rather than setting up a complicated system to make micro-payments that only some people would follow anyway, do what I do, determine a fair value for youself and make a donation. Not for one book, but estimate a year or two worth so you don't 'nickel and dime' the value of you donation with transaction fees.

Re:500 people read it?

[tod_miller]

Would that 'honesty book shop' appease Authors? I meant buy new releases and older copyrighted works (even out of print copyrighted that Gutenberg won't touch) If I want to re-read some Orwell, Asimov, Steinbeck or others, where do I go? (pah, library...)

Who cares what publishers think, they are wondering how they can be a middle man in a digital age. We will start with good bi-format books, all available in eBook, all 100% well formatted. Then some will move more over into eBooks.

Then every internet whore will inflict their putrid poetry onto the world. Tum tee tum.

Re:What about 5001?

[aussie_a]

I took my 500th shit this month, you dont hear me calling the press do you?

I'm assuming your signature link is related to this, so yes, you could say you did call the press.

Is it possible...

[cujo_1111]

...that a million net monkeys can fix the complete works of Shakespeare so that they language is spoken the correct way?

Instead of 'WHat light through yonder windows breaks?' we get 'Who is that hot chick I can see through my binoculars?'

A shame

[iamdrscience]

I think it's really a shame that current copyright laws (and retroactive extensions) have limited project Gutenberg to texts from a little after the turn of the century and before.

I just don't understand the point of retroactive copyright extensions. The idea behind copyrights, like patents, is to encourage innovation by allowing the creator an exclusive right for a limited time. If people believe copyright terms need to be extended to achieve this goal, fine. I disagree, but whatever. However, I think it's ludicrous that terms should be extended on works that have already been created, unless maybe they think that extending terms retroactively will lead to more works being produced in the past?

Re:A shame

[MikeCapone]

I just don't understand the point of retroactive copyright extensions. The idea behind copyrights, like patents, is to encourage innovation by allowing the creator an exclusive right for a limited time. If people believe copyright terms need to be extended to achieve this goal, fine. I disagree, but whatever. However, I think it's ludicrous that terms should be extended on works that have already been created, unless maybe they think that extending terms retroactively will lead to more works being produced in the past?

There's nothing to understand. Everything's about money now. Nobody cares about books, art or people. If you can make money - especially on the work of authors usually living near poverty - long after they are dead, then you are the winner of this big capitalistic orgy!

Re:A shame

[16K Ram Pack]

The change has of course happened because of the industrialisation of reproduction. At one time, if you wanted to hear music, you went to a show or bought the sheet music. Performance was expensive and does not scale up.

You could fill a music hall with people and pay the performers. You want to open another music hall? You need another set of performers.

Recorded music meant that each copy scaled the initial costs down. This has, over time become even more exaggerated, though. At one time, record production and promotion was quite amateurish, which also would mean that records were made which actually cost very little, but actually cost quite a lot in terms of the pressing/sleeve production.

Now, the situation is that CDs cost very little to record and manufacture but the music costs a huge amount to produce in terms of promotion/PR/grooming etc. The cost of CD number 1 is huge but by the time you reach CD number 2million, it costs very little.

This means that people involved are not small entrepreneurs of the Fred Carno, but major corporations with everything that comes with it.

Who picks this stuff?

[Animats]

"Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission"?

Still, I look forward to the day when someone starts digitizing the Mechanics Institute Library in San Francisco. It's a beautiful private library one can join. The books are in excellent condition, and there are century old original editions on the shelves.

But it's the magazine collection that's stunning. They have Popular Mechanics in bound volumes, all the way back to the beginning, when it was a serious scientific journal. All the major railroad magazines from the heyday of railroading. Every issue of Electric Railway Journal (the trade magazine of streetcars). Few other libraries kept that stuff.

Re:Who picks this stuff?

[jonathan_ingram]

If they were published before 1923, then they're public domain, and we'd love to have them in PG! All you need is a scanner, and some spare time :).

Until the middle of last year, we focused almost exclusively on books. Since then, we've been putting some very interesting periodicals through the site (Punch, The Strand Magazine, Scientific American, Notes & Queries, to name but a few). Magazine aimed specifically at boys (or, indeed, girls), would be a great addition to the pile!

law of averages?

[Anonymous Coward]

All in all, I have to say that I think this project is better than nothing at all. I am sure that the proofreading is better than what was there before.

However, I am curious as to just how accurate the proofreading is. I think that they try to improve accuracy by having many different volunteers; accuracy in numbers and all that. However, just because many people think in a certain way, does not mean that what they think is accurate. Just look at standardized tests. They are specifically designed to make use of common mistakes, so that the majority (the swell of the bell curve) all get the wrong answer together. Only a slim minority will get all the questions correct. Considering how many people (even educated people), get around average on even the verbal and English sections of such tests as the SAT, GRE, etc., I wonder if certain passages in books will be incorrectly edited on a mass scale. This would especially be true for older or more complex works.

Re:law of averages?

[jonathan_ingram]

However, I am curious as to just how accurate the proofreading is.

The answer is: surprisingly accurate. We proof one page at a time, working from the original scanned images, and emphasise that people should try as hard as they can to stick to the source material. As counter-intuitive as it may appear, this type of proofreading is actually hardest to do with material from the late 18th/19th century -- subtle changes in spelling (and small changes in accent systems for the non-English languages) make errors much harder for human proofreaders to correct than the earlier material, where spelling consistency was completely optional!

Each page is OCRed (and the ability of modern OCR programs is a major improvement over those of even a couple of years ago), proofread twice, and then the whole document is reviewed twice before being posted. We've also recently become much more aware of the need to make useful texts which can be used for scholarly purposes in the future, leading to such improvements as retention of all page numbers.

Re:law of averages?

[littlem]

We've also recently become much more aware of the need to make useful texts which can be used for scholarly purposes in the future, leading to such improvements as retention of all page numbers.

At the risk of going over very old and well-trodden ground, if PG wanted to be useful for "scholarly purposes" it should long ago have corrected the original mistake of using plain text, and used a markup that could have kept page numbers and other meta-information for scholars, while giving the common reader a clean text with a suitable style sheet. But even today on the PG website is a "justification" for sticking to plain text making it clear that scholars don't even figure in the intended audience for PG texts.

Re:law of averages?

[jonathan_ingram]

DP is 'semi attached' to PG -- I think you'll find that we are much more concerned both with keeping page and edition information, and with marking such information up in an appropriate way, than some of the traditionalists inside PG are.

For example, many of use make sure that we produce a valid XHTML edition of each project, and that the page numbers and edition information of the source are preserved. For an example text, see Graham Wallas -- Human Nature In Politics. We are currently working on a markup and stylesheet which will improve the end-user experience in several ways (and then, sigh, we will have to go back and move all the books we've already done to this new system. This may take a while :) ).

Re:law of averages?

[bbc]

"However, I am curious as to just how accurate the proofreading is."

That's very hard to tell, as there is no gold standard for accuracy. There are two sometimes conflicting goals in regards to accuracy that we have; one is to preserve the author's intent, the other to preserve the actual printed text. At some points these two conflict, for instance, when we would like to normalize spelling to increase readability.

There is currently some talk going on at the DP forums as to which system would be best to eliminate common errors, that everybody tends to overlook.

We already have several systems in place to help us with these. For instance, we use a specially modified font that helps to highlight differences between letters. It's dog ugly, but that's intentional; because it grates, you see errors much more quickly.

Also, once common errors are identified as such, we write software that can help us find such errors.

Finally, we use these new-found methods to look at books we posted to Project Gutenberg in the past, to measure the increase in accuracy.

Re:good books?

[mrchaotica]

Sherlock Holmes mysteries, old sci-fi (Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, etc), Edgar Allen Poe's short stories... there's lots of good stuff.

Re:good books?

[adolfojp]

http://www.icarusindie.com/Literature/Library/

That site has a couple of good ones. You should read first "The lost continent". The book was written shortly after, or during WWI and follows a hypotetical developement of the world if the new world and the old world had lost comunication until 200 years later. The most interest thing about those old science fiction books is to contrast their world view with ours and to see what futuristic devices would exist by now.


Cheers,

Adolfo

Rsync your own Gutenberg library

[gtoomey]

You can rsync your own copy of the Gutenberg library. I used the Aarnet mirror as its closest to me and fast.

Just be aware that the Gutenberg is some 135GB, and much of it is gif jpg and mp3 (spoken work books). So i just used --include in rsync to download the .txt .htm and .html files. Its a more manageable 10GB download.

Re:Rsync your own Gutenberg library

[Black Acid]

I use --exclude \*.zip --exclude \*.iso --exclude \*.mp3 with wget to achieve similar results. The advantage of this is you get all the images and indexes, without wasting space on computer synthesized spoken books (yech), zipped files which you already downloaded the contents of, and 4.7GB/700MB DVD or CD ISOs. On the other hand, the Project Gutenberg CD and DVD Project is worth looking into for "best of" collections if you don't want the whole library.

Make them renew each year

[Anonymous Coward]

It's so Disney can keep milking Mickey Mouse.

Here's what I want to see:

You get automatic copyright for 25 years. After that, you must pay $1 per year to keep something in copyright. If you can't be bothered to keep track of your stuff and pay the $1, it lapses into the public domain.

Disney will pay the $1 for Mickey ($1 for Steamboat Willy, $1 for each other cartoon, $1 for each book, etc.). But forgotten gems, like ancient Apple ][ games, will become legal public domain items.

I'd actually like to see a hard limit of 50 years or so for copyright, but even if you can't get that, at least the above scheme makes alot of stuff lapse into the public domain.

A cool feature: if the legal trail is tangled and murky, and no one knows who owns it anymore, no one will pay the $1 and it will fall into public domain. Let's say LSD Software wrote a fun game for the Commodore 64. Then ABC Games bought the game from LSD (who kept the rights to use the music in future games). Then ABC Games went under, but its assets were bought by PDQ Games, which later split into PDQ Software and Foo Bar Games. After that it gets REALLY complicated... anyway, after all that, who exactly owns that fun game? No one knows. It would take a court case to decide, but no one will bother so no one will ever know. Under the current system, you are technically a pirate if you keep the game, but there is no one you can pay a license fee and legally have the game! Catch-22.

Heck, Disney should want this. They make big bucks by Disney-ifying public domain stuff, so they should make sure things will actually go into the public domain in the future.

Re:Make them renew each year

[iamdrscience]

Lawrence Lessig proposes a similar scheme in "The Future of Ideas". I doubt he was the first, but that's just what you made me think of. It's a good book, even though it can get kind of dry at times (it is, at least in some capacity, a book about law after all).

As far as your scheme though, I would really like a hard extension limit and I think 25 years for a default term is really too much (I mean, to use your example of Apple II games, many of those games wouldn't even quite be out of term yet). I think 5 or 10 would be much better.

Re:Make them renew each year

[RAMMS EIN]

``You get automatic copyright for 25 years. After that, you must pay $1 per year to keep something in copyright. If you can't be bothered to keep track of your stuff and pay the $1, it lapses into the public domain.''

I would even go a bit further. Why even have a default term at all? (and 25 years is a LONG time) And $1 is arguably a bit little. If you really care, you can pay a bit more. Maybe we can even have different levels of protection - pay nothing if you allow modifications, pay more to retain exclusive rights to distribution, etc.

I think this is an interesting idea worth investigating. Thank you for publishing it!

Oh, and BTW, I will be using your idea as if it were mine, unless you pay your $1, of course. ;-)

Re:good books?

[jonathan_ingram]

There are many sites which have taken some of the more popular works from Project Gutenberg, and put a more user-friendly directory style front end to them. One of the best is Blackmask.com, which also contains works from non-Gutenberg free book providers. There are 312 works in the 'Science Fiction' section alone.

Re:because

[jonathan_ingram]

because playboy hasnt lapsed into the public domain yet...

Very true, although several of us do keep talking about searching for some Victorian Porn to put through the site :). There's actually quite a lot of public domain 'erotica' (anything written and published before 1923, for example) -- we just need people to scan it and contribute it to the site! We've had a couple of 'racy' books, and not surprisingly they tend to be proofed very quickly.

Re:What about 5001?

[jonathan_ingram]

The next book won't yield a news item, but is no less important. You are very welcome to join us, and help us proof all the books which will also provoke no news items until text 10,000 comes along -- which you can also complain about :).

Re:How strange

[jonathan_ingram]

I'll let you in on a secret -- this isn't really our 5000th book! Some larger works are split into multiple projects, so while this is our 5000th *project*, it's around 10% off being our 5000th *book*. The text we chose for *this* 5000 was supposed to be appropriate for an internal celebration, rather than one which would be announced to the world -- it's a great example of the sort of text which would be very unlikely to get into PG if DP didn't exist, and it gives us useful biographical information to use in the 'blurb' for future projects. It's hard to stop people from submitting stories to Slashdot, though :).

formatting

[golgotha007]

I think the Gutenburg project is a terrific idea!

My only complaint is with the formatting. Project Gutenburg uses hard formatting within the text. I think that's an extremely stupid idea.

There should be zero formatting within the text (other than paragraph breaks). Whatever client you're using should provide the formatting for you.

Let the client handle the presentation!!

Re:formatting

[ragnar]

The problem you raise is not so easy to solve. While it sounds nice to separate content from presentation, in many cases the presentation is part of the content. Take the indentation of poetry for example, or for a more specific example, e. e . cummings. Once you wade into these areas you start talking about marking the text, which is a tricky issue. The Text Encoding Iniative has been hammering out a solution for a decade, but the learning curve is steep.

As much as I think the project is digging themselves into a whole with hard formatting, I can understand why they do it. The alternative is a nasty can of worms.

Helping improve OCR software?

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems to me that this project could have a large impact on OCR readers.

Think about it. You have thousands of volunteers pouring over images, and then providing the corrected text (if necessary). Couldn't this also be used to "train" the OCR software to become better at identifying text?

If you log the image, the original OCR'd text, and the manually verified text you could use it in a test case for future OCR software.

I do this all the time when I write data validation/cleanup software.. I run my input data through a program, capture the output, and manually verify that it is correct.. making changes if necessary. I then use the two pieces of information in my test cases as a benchmark. If I introduce a bug in my code that causes something I already wrote to suddenly break, or output incorrect results, I know about it instantly. Works great with database correction code.

Maybe I'm simplifying this too much, but I sure hope someone is capturing all this great data. It could come in handy..

from the error-checking-and-correcting dept.

[GothChip]

I didn't realise this department existed at Slashdot.

Shocking

[CBDSteve]

But not as shocking as this

Re:Shocking

[Dizzle]

Some of those are legit too. Professional/Professor reading gets shortened to profreading. The other mistakes are mostly users.

Re:How strange

[bbc]

This is all my fault! :-(

I got a bit carried away. This 5000th project was organized so that as much proofreaders as possible would work on it. (Although any book going through DP runs a chance of being proofread by many separate people, usually proofreaders stick with a certain book for a while, so that the work has only been seen by 50 or so.) I was so glad we pulled it off, that I sent a story to Slashdot without thinking.

Re:good books?

[jonathan_ingram]

Does DP take on new versions of existing PG books?

Yes, we do -- although as I mention in an earlier post, we have a year's worth of material as it is, without going back and re-doing the older material already in PG. However, as you say, some of PGs content is below the standards we expect of newly produced text. Hopefully we can go back and correct *all* PGs content over time. The main factor stopping us is that we need page scans of any project before it can go through DP. If you know of any page images of a clearable edition of Ulysses, or indeed if you have a clearable edition which you are willing to scan, then we would gladly put it through the site.

Request for MATH experts

[jhutch2000]

Right now, we've got plenty of old math intensive books ready to move through the DP system. Because of ASCII terrible ability to handle equation formatting, we use TeX layout. The average DPer doesn't know TeX and it's a rather high learning curve to get started on. So, since Slashdot is full of self-professed geeks...all you TeX geeks should join up and help with the TeX formatted MATH texts. I've got plenty of books scanned and ready to go, so don't think you'll run us out of 'em any time soon!

JHutch

Re:Request for MATH experts

[jhutch2000]

Only one MATH book is ever in the first round at any one time. Hilbert's book is that one right now.

The logic behind this is simple. Most of our volunteers avoid these books like the plague and if we kept releasing new ones, pretty soon the entire first round would be only MATH books.

To see what's waiting in the queue for English language math books, see here. For Languages Other Than English (LOTE) math books, see here.

Re:What books to read

[bbc]

There are several websites that offer free ebooks, and that allow people to review them.

Of the authors I got to know through Project Gutenberg, Stephen Leacock and Theodor Storm stick out in my mind the most. Oh, and Hendrik Conscience turned out to be less boring than I thought after proofing the first of his books to go through DP (but so far he's only available in Dutch).

Public apology

[bbc]

I would like to apologize to TPTB (The Powers That Be) at Distributed Proofreaders for messing up by posting this story to Slashdot.

The 5000th Posted celebrations were supposed to be internal. There is a discrepancy between works posted and books posted: sometimes a book gets split up. The big celebrations were intended for 5000 actual books posted.

I am afraid I got a little carried away, and hope Slashdot will still carry the real story of 5000 books posted to Project Gutenberg.

Accuracy

[jefu]

I have worked on the distributed proofing of a couple of texts and found that the accuracy of a page after the second proofing was often close to perfect.

One of the books I worked on was the "Anatomy of Melancholy" and I (conveniently) have a copy myself. There were often more differences between the scanned image of the page and my copy than between the scanned image and the proofread text.

Don't underestimate the amount of work people put into this too - for "Anatomy of Melancholy" it often took 30 minutes to proof a single page because the page often had latin and very small footnotes.

Re:Any chance images could be made available?

[jonathan_ingram]

Yes, the long term plan is to make the page images we use in proofreading available for end users. There are several logistical problems with this (mainly to do with bandwidth and disk space), but all the images are archived for the time when we can make them available.

It's possible that we might interface with something like the Million Book Project, which makes page images, but no text, available.

Re:What ever happened to Project Gutenberg 2?

[jhutch2000]

There was a lot of internal contention about that "pay" site using the Gutenberg trademark. For the most part, the furor has died down, and as I understand it, for the most part, the World E-book library thing has given up use of the Gutenberg trademark and some checks and balances have been put in place to prevent the unilateral decision that led to that controversy.

Re:because

[jhutch2000]

Yeah! I'm one of the "several" that Jon's referring to. I got a real kick out of recent book that was posted by us to PG...

Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living

For a turn of the century study of sex (published 1919), this guy was amazingly (IMHO) progressive! A very fun read! JHutch

Re:Once again

[jonathan_ingram]

(this story is off the front page now, so I doubt you will be looking for an answer, but I'll answer you anyway :) )

I have to question why humans are doing the bulk of the editing for project gutenberg.

There are several reasons. Firstly, there are lots of people around who can spare five minutes to proofread a page -- particularly when it has already been OCRed. Secondly, we are a completely volunteer organisation, with no 'plan' as to the books we scan, and so having to find and scan two seperate copies of a text would reduce the amount of material on the site considerably. In particular, it would almost certainly stop us from proofing some of the older and/or harder material.

I can only suggest that you join DP, and test the process out. I think you'll find that it works surprisingly well.