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Distributed Proofreaders Posts 5,000th E-book 144

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."
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Distributed Proofreaders Posts 5,000th E-book

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  • by andrewa ( 18630 ) on Wednesday August 25, 2004 @01:43AM (#10065321)
    I am prowd to bee won off thows prewf reeders
  • So.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by TheRedHorse ( 559375 ) on Wednesday August 25, 2004 @01:44AM (#10065330)
    ....I guess the slashdot editors aren't members?
  • Wonderful (Score:5, Informative)

    by Chasuk ( 62477 ) <chasuk@gmail.com> on Wednesday August 25, 2004 @01:45AM (#10065339)
    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!
  • Hm! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by martingunnarsson ( 590268 ) * <martin&snarl-up,com> on Wednesday August 25, 2004 @01:46AM (#10065341) Homepage
    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! (Score:3, Interesting)

      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! (Score:5, Informative)

      by jonathan_ingram ( 30440 ) on Wednesday August 25, 2004 @03:02AM (#10065661) Homepage
      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! (Score:2, Interesting)

        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! (Score:3, Informative)

          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 [rastko.net]' to focus on these works. At the moment the focus is on Eastern E
    • Re:Hm! (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Offer their services? It's 99% volunteer work. Why would someone volunteer to proofread some magazine? Gutenberg works because the books that it generates are for non-commercial/academic use - that's why volunteers feel they're doing something good when they're contributing.
  • by jamoan ( 807175 ) on Wednesday August 25, 2004 @01:46AM (#10065345)
    Wear can I apply? i have excellent grammer skills.
    • by Anonymous Coward
      You make with the grammar, and the orthographic things, do I. Good concept, it is.
    • Re:I need a new job (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jonathan_ingram ( 30440 ) on Wednesday August 25, 2004 @03:07AM (#10065674) Homepage
      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! (Score:4, Funny)

    by tod_miller ( 792541 ) on Wednesday August 25, 2004 @01:46AM (#10065348) Journal
    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)
  • 5052 (Score:2, Informative)

    And since then they seem to have proofed another 52 books - that's not a bad rate considering...
  • 500 people read it? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by tod_miller ( 792541 ) on Wednesday August 25, 2004 @01:52AM (#10065376) Journal
    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)
    • by wolfdvh ( 700954 ) on Wednesday August 25, 2004 @02:09AM (#10065462)
      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.

      • 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 who [xmission.com]
    • Not all of it; just a few pages each. Thank God this one went out of copyright before congress extended it, or it might not have become such a hit.
  • by cujo_1111 ( 627504 ) on Wednesday August 25, 2004 @02:03AM (#10065431) Homepage Journal
    ...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?'
  • I would have thought that if they were going to hold this up as a landmark that they would have picked a more notable book. I mean, I skimmed through that book and it seemed to have a lot of information and everything, but it's hardly something you would ever read all the way through.
    • Re:How strange (Score:4, Informative)

      by jonathan_ingram ( 30440 ) on Wednesday August 25, 2004 @03:48AM (#10065817) Homepage
      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 :).

      • Re:How strange (Score:2, Interesting)

        by bbc ( 126005 )
        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.
  • A shame (Score:5, Insightful)

    by iamdrscience ( 541136 ) on Wednesday August 25, 2004 @02:10AM (#10065466) Homepage
    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 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MikeCapone ( 693319 ) <skelterhell@yah[ ]com ['oo.' in gap]> on Wednesday August 25, 2004 @02:17AM (#10065493) Homepage Journal
      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 (Score:2, Insightful)

        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 product

      • But don't be afraid! As evolution and free market rules state this kinds of civilizations are bound to destroy themselves clearing way to more healthy ones!
        PS: Just don't take the world with it. :(
    • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 25, 2004 @02:57AM (#10065638)
      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.
      • by iamdrscience ( 541136 ) on Wednesday August 25, 2004 @03:07AM (#10065677) Homepage
        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.
      • ``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 excl
        • You don't want to raise the bar to get something coprighted, the best ideas often come from those who dodn't have a lot of money.

          But creating a intellectual property tax to be paid after a piece of IP turns 25 is, IMHO, a good idea. Take the example of the beatles, if it wasn't for disney and friends lobbying to have copyright extended then their work would already be public domain. But the beatles music still makes money, fair enough, while financially lucrative the copyright holders can afford to pay t
        • "And $1 is arguably a bit little."

          It's not about the money, it's about the effort. Most people won't be willing to renew most works. As a result, these works become public domain (and verifiably so).

          This creates several benificial situations:

          1. If you want to use a work that the author lost interest in, you can.

          2. If you want to use a work that the author still is interested in, you now have a way to find out who the author is and how he can be contacted.

          (When I say 'use' I mean 'use in a way that wou
      • "Heck, Disney should want this."

        Very much so.

        The fact that Big Copyright have declared themselves fierce opponents to any law that would reintroduce registration and renewal in the US, has made some people remark that their ultimate motive is control.
      • To avoid the problem of companies renewing something infinitely, I'd suggest not having a minimum period, and charging $1 for the first year. For each subsequent year, the renewal fee would double. So the 2nd year it'd be $2, 3rd year $4, etc...

        By the time the copyright got to 21 years it'd be over a million dollars to renew it, which would strongly encourage people to just let it go to the public domain. This way would also protect small time inventors/writers, since even at 7 years, it's only $64 to

    • Moreover, I submit that it is an unconstitutional ex-post facto law. There is a reason the Constitution prohibited retroactive laws, but we seem to be ignoring that principle today.

  • by Animats ( 122034 ) on Wednesday August 25, 2004 @02:16AM (#10065489) Homepage
    "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.

    • Sigh. Nothing can really capture the reality. Once when I was much much younger a friend gave me some "Boy's Own Papers" c.a. 1912. I still lust after some of the gadgets in the adverts. Whoa. Seriously interesting stuff.

      If you want to see geek heaven go look through the adverts...

      I keep going to look in the hope that someone will put Olaf Stapleton or EE "Doc" Smith up but alas rights are a real bitch...

      (1950's SciAm are pretty cool too - stuff about electroluminescence and (cough) computers).
      • 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!
    • As with all volunteer efforts, if you want to see it done, do it yourself! :) In the example library you gave, it probably is just a simple matter of no volunteer currently providing scans is a member of that library. If you have the time and inclination, grab some of those wonderful sounding periodicals, a scanner and get to work. Head over to the DP forums and we'll all be glad to help you get started. JHutch


  • does anyone have suggestions for fiction titles on gutenburg?

    i need a good read, but i dont want to pay or find something good myself.
    • Re:good books? (Score:3, Informative)

      by mrchaotica ( 681592 )
      Sherlock Holmes mysteries, old sci-fi (Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, etc), Edgar Allen Poe's short stories... there's lots of good stuff.
      • I've just finished listening to H.G. Wells, invisible man.

        I download a load of texts, put them on my ipaq, then use flite to do text->speach and read them out.

        Btw, has anyone thought of marking up any of the books so they can be read better by something like festival? (emotions, sex of character etc)
    • Re:good books? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by adolfojp ( 730818 )
      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
    • Re:good books? (Score:5, Informative)

      by jonathan_ingram ( 30440 ) on Wednesday August 25, 2004 @02:58AM (#10065643) Homepage
      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 [blackmask.com], which also contains works from non-Gutenberg free book providers. There are 312 works in the 'Science Fiction' section alone.
    • I just finished the PG edition of Joyce's Ulysses. It's a difficult but rewarding read. I loved having it available as an etext, but I have to say, the proofreading was marginal at best. <humor>The entire last chapter had no punctuation marks at all!</humor>

      Seriously, the text was in pretty bad shape, with lots of common OCR errors: 1 = I, 5 = S, b = h, etc., chapter titles missing, etc. Does DP take on new versions of existing PG books? I'd volunteer to try and do a better job on Ulysses.
      • "Does DP take on new versions of existing PG books?"

        Yes, but I don't know if there are any conditions attached.

        Better would be to next time keep notes of all the errors you encounter, and send them to Project Gutenberg, where volunteers will use them to correct the book.

        The Project Gutenberg FAQ tells you what to send where, and how.
      • Re:good books? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by jonathan_ingram ( 30440 ) on Wednesday August 25, 2004 @07:42AM (#10066788) Homepage
        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.
    • What sort of stuff do you like? Scary? Romantic? Adventurous? Scientific? Weird?

      Some of the famous literature that is in the public domain: Jules Verne, Sherlock Holmes, Frankenstein, War of the Worlds, Wuthering Heights, the Bible, anything Shakespeare, Aesop's fables, Mother Goose, Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz, Ulysses (both Homer's and Joyce's versions), The Picture of Dorian Gray, Heart of Darkness, Treasure Island, The Jungle Books, et cetera, et cetera.
  • law of averages? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by 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
    • Re:law of averages? (Score:5, Informative)

      by jonathan_ingram ( 30440 ) on Wednesday August 25, 2004 @02:53AM (#10065625) Homepage
      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.

      • by littlem ( 807099 ) on Wednesday August 25, 2004 @03:26AM (#10065752)
        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" [gutenberg.net] 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 [gutenberg.net]. We are currently working on a markup
        • 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,

          Personally I'm of the opinion that allmost everything is better represented as plain text. In extreme cases, maybe plain text + italics, bold, and the ability to link in pictues.

          I can understand other arguments, but in general, I think plain text is the most universal and common format - and thus best suited.

          Maybe every
        • "if PG wanted to be useful for "scholarly purposes" it should long ago have corrected the original mistake of using plain text"

          The sort of scholar that would make such unqualified statements about the need for mark-up has no place in academia.

          Project Gutenberg has excellent reasons to stay with plain text as the most basic distribution format, reasons that have proven themselves over time.

          Smart scholars have many uses for plain Gutenberg texts.
        • I agree, PG text format is not good for reproducing the features of a printed book. Much better to use something like TEI [tei-c.org]. However, marking up in a semantic format raises a hairy issue: the proofreader needs to interpret the meaning of textual elements (such as italics which are used for a foreign language term - that's different from italics used as emphasis). That requires more training than simple PG markup. And of course there is the issue of a decent user interface...

          Having said this, maybe these pro

        • Plain text is done in PG for ONE reason - practicality. They can convert a book into plain text and leave it - any kind of markup language will eventually expire, standards will change, etc. But pure plain text with no formatting will be readable forever. Plus, page numbers are simply now included in the plain text - no meta data, no markups, nothing extra - so that scholars and students can refer to page numbers in footnotes.

          The audience for PG is EVERYONE - every single person on the whole planet, reg
      • Accuracy (Score:4, Interesting)

        by jefu ( 53450 ) on Wednesday August 25, 2004 @08:45AM (#10067375) Homepage Journal
        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:law of averages? (Score:2, Informative)

      by bbc ( 126005 )
      "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 e
  • by gtoomey ( 528943 ) on Wednesday August 25, 2004 @02:47AM (#10065609)
    You can rsync your own copy of the Gutenberg library [gutenberg.net]. I used the Aarnet mirror [promo.net] 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.

    • 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 [gutenberg.net] is worth looking into for "best of" collections if you don't want the whole library.
  • ...they don't use Microsoft word [slashdot.org]
    • Project Gutenberg posts texts in formats that are offered by the volunteers and that the gatekeeping volunteers know how to check.

      If a volunteer feels comfortable with MS Word, then by all means they should try and commit a book in that format. The only demand Project Gutenberg makes, is that the etext is also submitted in 'plain vanilla text' format, so that anybody can read the text, anywhere and anytime.
  • formatting (Score:4, Interesting)

    by golgotha007 ( 62687 ) on Wednesday August 25, 2004 @04:16AM (#10065882)
    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!!
    • yes, zero fotmatting would be great for those silly Eiffel Tower-shaped Guillaume Apollinaire's poems; finally they would be readable.
    • Most -- or all? -- of the books posted from Distributed Proofreaders to Project Gutenberg in recent time are available both as plain ASCII text (hard formated) and as HTML -- meaning it can be converted to "soft formated" txt, PDF or anything else.
    • We're getting there. It is surprising just how much work is require of getting a set "standard" in place for such a setup.

      Currently, there is at least one effort to come up with a XHTML conformant standard (it has stalled somewhat due to summer volunteer burnout) and a TEI-lite conformant standard. The problem is getting a standard simple enough for the average lay person to remember it well enough to actually mark up texts, while complex enough to handle 99% of the texts we see.

      It ain't easy!

      JHutch
    • Re:formatting (Score:3, Informative)

      by ragnar ( 3268 )
      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 [tei-c.org] has been hammering out a solution for a decade, but the learning curve is steep.

      As much as I think the project is digging thems
  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 25, 2004 @04:35AM (#10065940)
    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..
  • by GothChip ( 123005 ) on Wednesday August 25, 2004 @04:45AM (#10065981) Homepage
    I didn't realise this department existed at Slashdot.
  • There are so many books there, how can you choose one to read?
    • by bbc ( 126005 )
      There are several websites that offer free ebooks [xs4all.nl], 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).
  • by jhutch2000 ( 801707 ) on Wednesday August 25, 2004 @07:52AM (#10066867)
    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'm an occasional volunteer there, and I know LaTeX and math. So, I just took a look. Where are the math books? You got me all hot to help, and the only thing I see is Hilbert's ``Foundations of Geometry''.
      • 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 [pgdp.net]. For Languages Other Than English (LOTE) math books, see here [pgdp.net].

  • Public apology (Score:3, Informative)

    by bbc ( 126005 ) on Wednesday August 25, 2004 @08:04AM (#10066960)
    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.
  • but it's good to finally get electronic versions of those books that are bought by the yard to fill the bookshelves in 'Bohemian' pubs and coffee shops. To round out the experience, download the text of these books and write a PERL script to 'pulp' them. One gripe - plenty of books by Abbott but none by Costello - call that a library?
  • This previous story [slashdot.org] mentions a possible split with a company charging for all the books and taking the name. I see now that http://www.projectgutenberg.info/ [projectgutenberg.info] doesn't seem to be selling books anymore, but www.worldebooklibrary.com is up. Did they give up the Project Gutenberg trademark?
    • 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.
  • if not, give it a try:

    1. Download a text: (say Alice's Adventures in Wonderland [gutenberg.net]). The new site has a vastly improved interface; listing books in available formats (always plain text, sometimes pdf, palm doc, tex)

    2. Have at it in you text reader of choice. If you are on the mac, I highly recommend the free tofu [mac.com]. It breaks the text into columns that are high as the window. Navigate by shifting columns or pages of text. This simple change makes a huge difference when reading large amounts of
  • I have to question why humans are doing the bulk of the editing for project gutenberg. It seems to me that if you have two independent scans and OCRs of a text, then it's highly unlikely they would agree on a mistake. Any discrepancy would be a mistake on the part of one or more of the OCRs, which should then be sent to a human for revision.

    Again, I think the likelihood to two independent OCR processes (seperate text, seperate scanners, seperate OCR packages) would both make the same mistake, so it's mostl

    • Re:Once again (Score:2, Informative)

      (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 copie


  • How about old scientific works, journals up to say 1920's?

    I know the more recent journal articles are copyrighted and therefore must have some lengthy protection on them, but what about classic old articles (like some of Einstein's work in the early 1900's)?

Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced -- even a proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it. -- John Keats

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