I've joined the happy band of volunteer nitpickers at Distributed Proofreaders, which is where most of Project Gutenberg's e-books are prepared.
I thought the proofreading task would involve looking for spelling mistakes and typos, but no! Or not exactly. You don't need to be able to spell, you just need to be able to spot visual differences:
"Mostly your job is to fix mistakes left by the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. Compare the text carefully to the scanned image of the page, line by line (or word by word, or letter by letter)."Here's a screen shot of a page being edited (scanned image at the top, text at the bottom):
(click on the image if you want a slighter larger version)I signed up this afternoon and since then have checked seven pages. It doesn't take long to get through each page, and there's no commitment in terms of the number of pages finished. You can sign in whenever you want and do as many pages as you like.
It was quite confusing to start off with, and (as I Twittered yesterday) when I did the proofreading quiz I got only one out of five pages proofed correctly, so I guess there'll be a bit to learn.
The beauty of the process is that there are three stages of proofreading and then two of formatting - if beginners in the first stage miss seeing a page's mistakes or make some sort of proofreading mistake of their own, experienced volunteers working at stages 2 to 5 will fix things. It's a team effort. Apparently there are 71,820+ users and 19,395 of them have proofread at least one first-stage page. (I don't know what this means, though; have 50,000+ users signed up but not proofread any pages at all?)
More volunteers = more free Project Gutenberg e-books, so if you're interested, please take a look at the site. As the introductory email says:
"Remember, every page you do helps make these books available to the world, for free, forever, more rapidly. [...] each page we proofread is another small step closer to building the greatest library in history!"
