5 Years of Distributed Proofreaders: Some good information from Teleread on the fifth anniverysary of Distributed Proofreading over at Gutenberg,
Project Gutenberg now hosts more than 16,000 ebooks, but until recently that amount numbered in the hundreds. Part of the enormous growth was caused by a web application written by Charles Franks that gave readers who had always wanted to give back to the project, but had thus far been scared away by the long production time of any given ebook, a way to contribute.
[…] On November 8, Charles Frank and another volunteer, Charles Aldorondo, decided to try a little experiment to stress test the new hardware and to get more volunteers involved. They sent a story to the highly popular “News for Nerds” website Slashdot […]
[…] Distributed Proofreaders corrected a hundred etexts within a few days. Membership sky-rocketed from 841 to 5,156 within a week
As it happens, The Gutenberg Project was the subject of the first post ever on this Web site (check that URL). The Distibuted Proofreading, specifically, was the subject of post #41 — I actually proofread three pages of some book.
I've written before about Project Gutenberg. It's a massive archive of free books that they simply give away online. They have several thousand books which are in the public domain, and the number is increasing steadily. It's probably going to increase a little more rapidly due to the new…
The Gutenberg Project: Gutenberg has been around since the Internet was very, very young -- the Web wasn't even born yet. It's an effort to catalog as many free books and texts as possible. Gutenberg has thousands of books from hundreds of authors; all in the public domain,…
