So, you knew it had to be something extra special to forget about the blog for a second day. And let me tell you, it is special!

A couple of weeks ago, at The World Famous Ace of Spades Headquarters Book Thread, a fellow asked for volunteers to proofread crappy old books at Distributed Proofreaders (DP). Can you believe it? I’ve done over 300 pages so far.

Distributed Proofreaders provides a web-based method to ease the conversion of Public Domain books into e-books. By dividing the workload into individual pages, many volunteers can work on a book at the same time, which significantly speeds up the creation process.
During proofreading, volunteers are presented with a scanned page image and the corresponding OCR text on a single web page. This allows the text to be easily compared to the image, proofread, and sent back to the site. A second volunteer is then presented with the first volunteer’s work and the same page image, verifies and corrects the work as necessary, and submits it back to the site. The book then similarly progresses through a third proofreading round and two formatting rounds using the same web interface.

Once all the pages have completed these steps, a post-processor carefully assembles them into an e-book, optionally makes it available to interested parties for ‘smooth reading’, and submits it to the Project Gutenberg archive.

The goal is to match exactly (with a few exceptions) what was printed in the original crappy old book. There are guidelines, tutorials, and learning curves. I figured the best way to get good at proofreading was practice. And as we all know, practice takes time. 

So that’s my excuse.