eBooks
For several years, I was a very active contributor to Project Gutenberg’s Distributed Proofreading project. I don’t have much time to give to the project at the moment, but preserving old books in a form that everyone can enjoy is still a passion. When I first got involved in DP the world of online books was very different — this was before the massive book scanning projects of Microsoft and Google Books.
Even now, with over a million book scans available on Archive.org, there is still a need for books not just to be digitized (scanned), but converted into human-readable text (transcribed). These online book scanning projects are also very US-centric: there are many interesting and important books which are public domain in the UK, but will not be public domain in the US for many years.
DP does a very good job of transcribing ‘easy’ books, but is not as successful with more demanding texts. There are texts which I uploaded to DP in 2003 which have still not been fully processed. Below, then, will appear books I am working on transcribing by myself.
The first project is Robert Recorde’s Whetstone of Witte.