25000 Books Proofread By Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders

New submitter fritsd writes "Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders, a volunteer site which helps provide public domain books to Project Gutenberg, announced that their 100 000+ volunteers have reached the milestone of 25 000 books scanned, OCRed, and then meticulously proofread." The 25000th title is The Art and Practice of Silver Printing by Capt. Abney and H. P. Robinson.

Comments

Thanks!

[Tim the Gecko]

Many thanks to Project Gutenberg and their volunteers. There is a lot of great public domain material out there, and I've especially enjoyed Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Trollope. Also Jules Verne's work is pretty good for French learners.

Re:meticulously proofread

[Halotron1]

Yep, multiple rounds, and multiple levels of proofers and formatters
who have to earn the right to access those higher rounds
by completing hundreds of pages and passing a few tests.

Re:meticulously proofread

[butalearner]

I signed up and proofread a few pages when I saw someone mention this site in the comments a few weeks ago. It's pretty interesting stuff and is mostly intuitive, but there are some tricky corner cases, e.g. hyphenated words that span two lines. Back in the day, publishers were pretty inconsistent about what words were hyphenated (e.g. to-day), and Project Gutenberg is (rightly) adamant that the text maintains the original spelling and hyphenation.

The only thing I completely missed was that I didn't put an extra newline at the top of the page when the first line was the start of a new paragraph. Those instances were found and corrected by the second-round proofreader. There is a third round of proofing, two rounds of formatting, two rounds of post processing, and then an optional "Smooth Reading" round that anyone can do. I've checked out a few of the finished products, and they are much, much better than the naked OCR'd texts of old.

Re:meticulously proofread

[mspohr]

I have read quite a few of their books and have found them all to be high quality edits.
I would like to thank everyone who has worked on the project for the excellent job they are doing.

(In contrast, I recently purchased a Kindle copy of Paul Theroux's The Happy Isles of Oceania which is about 20 years old and they obviously produced the electronic copy by OCR and from the looks of it did little or no proofreading. There were obvious typos on every page. It's irritating that a publisher who actually get's paid to do this work can't be bothered to do even cursory proofreading.)

Makes you appreciate the fine work the Gutenberg people are doing.