Project Gutenberg

Don’t want to step on OH’s time in the sun, but I wanted to slip this in between her post and Jen-T’s on Monday. The category is a new one, “FYI.” It’s really just a heads up, although comments are welcome.

I’ve been trolling Project Gutenberg for that past several days, ever since I got a hit there when I was Googling for info on a very old book, which they just happen to have online. 150+ year old book, and it’s online for free download!!!!

If you’re unfamiliar with PG, they take books which are in the public domain, scan them, run the scans through an optical character reader (OCR), which turns them into editable text. Then they are proofread so that the scanned version matches the original and, voila! Free books!!!! Well, there are more steps than that, but basically FREE BOOKS! Ones you might never see otherwise. FREE. Did I say…/;+)

It’s a great initiative, since it puts books many people use for research right out there where anyone can get them. No more trying to find a library that can get it for you, or saving your pennies to buy an actual hard copy of a very old book. Or just for reading pleasure. I have most of what P.G. Wodehouse wrote, somewhere, but I can download many of his books now and reread without digging through a couple hundred boxes. YAY!

In case anyone is interested, there’s an affiliated site called Distributed Proofreaders, where you can sign up to be a proofreader, or one of the other volunteer jobs that get’s the process done.

If you have books that meet the “public domain” requirements and can scan them or have them scanned, you can submit them for inclusion in Project Gutenberg. It’s a really cool thing. I signed up to be a proofreader, which I think is pretty exciting. You know what a nit picker I am. At least, in this, I only have to make things match, not correct the original. /;+)))

62 comments January 21st, 2007