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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."
I am prowd to bee won off thows prewf reeders
....I guess the slashdot editors aren't members?
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!
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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 :-)
Martin
Wear can I apply? i have excellent grammer skills.
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)
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
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)
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...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?'
If I point out that you are incorrect, making me a foe does not make you any more correct.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
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.
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.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
Very true, although several of us do keep talking about searching for some Victorian Porn to put through the site
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
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 :).
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
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.
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
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
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 :).
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
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!!
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..
I didn't realise this department existed at Slashdot.
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.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
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
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.
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.
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.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.