If you like to read, you ought to be familiar with Project Gutenberg, producer of free ebooks, whose goal is to provide etexts of all publications in the public domain.
I could go into a rant here about how, in the new Gilded Age, our Congress is attempting to prevent anything (from Mickey Mouse to vaccine formulations) from ever entering the public domain again, but that's not my purpose today. My purpose is to get information into Project Gutenberg, while we can. And you can help.
How? One major way is through Distributed Proofreaders. One page at a time.
I stumbled across Distributed Proofreaders about a year and a half ago, and since then I've been reading cookbooks, Victorian magazines, children's stories, Old English poetry, papal histories, 17th century Italian dictionaries, Civil War diaries, old joke books, pulp fiction, German homeopathic guides, Socialist manifestos -- you name it, it crosses the threshold of Distributed Proofreaders.
Or if it hasn't crossed their threshold and it's out of copyright, you can scan it in and send it to them yourself.
Maybe you've been dying to put your knowledge of Latin or Old English or ancient Greek or fraktur to work. Or maybe you couldn't figure where to find a decent free treatise on edible fungi. Or maybe your skills lie in HTML processing, and you'd like to put the whole project together.
You can read whole books, through a process known as "Smooth Reading", where you're lightly reviewing a near-finished product to see if anything seems out of place. Or you can dive right into the sausage-making, a page at a time, comparing OCR output to scanned images, to make sure that "Horner" doesn't come out as "Homer."
I'll let DP speak for themselves, and I'll quote liberally, because they're all about free use:
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 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.
Here's the important part:
How You Can Help
* Register with the site as a volunteer.
* Read the introductory email you receive and the Beginning Proofreader's FAQ.
* Confirm your registration, sign in, choose a project, and try proofreading a page or two!
Unregistered guests are invited to participate in Smooth Reading.
Remember that there is no commitment expected on this site beyond the understanding that you do your best.
Proofread as often or as seldom as you like, and as many or as few pages as you like. We encourage people to do 'a page a day', but it's entirely up to you! We hope you will join us in our mission of 'preserving the literary history of the world in a freely available form for everyone to use'.
The poll includes a random selection of projects currently in 1st stage proofing that you can help with now (except the last one, which is currently in post-processing -- I needed a pie equivalent, and all of the cookbooks had already gone on to the next level).
I love it, and I think you might too: if you don't like reading, why are you here? Please don't tell me you're using Daily Kos to filter your YouTube selections.
Help build mankind's library:
http://www.pgdp.net/...