Project Gutenberg News

As many of you know, I like to do something around this time every year to take a new step forward in Project Gutenberg.

As luck would have it, I recently received an email reminder from one of our volunteers who reads our eBooks out loud for those who need or want audio eBook versions of our library.

This volunteer was kind enough to keep a log of errors found while recording one of our classics eBooks out loud and then sent us that list of errors, and now was following up.

Due to the fact that we receive more errors messages than we have volunteers to handle, these errors were not corrected, which stimulated me to write a request for help on this in a recent Project Gutenberg Newsletter.

The results were immediate, effective, and continuing.

The new edition, complete with ~23 corrections is online and has been for a couple days already, and we are still getting more volunteers for error correction.

This is a great and wonderful thing because the one thing in the history of eBooks that separates Project Gutenberg is an everlasting continuing process of improvement. Continue Reading »

Back in January we mentioned that there was going to be a Newsletter Team. Unfortunately this will now not happen.

Project Gutenberg is therefore putting forward a request for volunteers to help out with the weekly newsletter. Everyone is welcome to participate no matter what your background.

Please use our Contact page and let us know your interest. All messages will be forwarded directly to Michael Hart.

If there are any experts out there in Perl or Excel, you would be greatly appreciated in helping us with PG statistical numbers; daily, weekly, monthly and yearly. We can provide data, and hopefully you can provide us with weekly, monthly or yearly totals for the Newsletters.

If you would like a complete listing of each book title, and the accompanying data, we do have a daily listing to subscribe to, which also includes additional data on the book as it is uploaded for final preparation.

[Edited by Mike Cook]

Since my relocation to Germany I’m struggling to find as much time to research and put together interesting articles for the newsletter, so I’m putting this request out for volunteers.

You will not be expected to write dozens of articles per week, although you are welcome but if there were just a handful of people writing one per week or fortnight, this would really help to provide more interesting content for the newsletter.

Back in August, Marie Lebert wrote the excellent ‘The @folio Project‘ article and has indicated that she may have one or two more over the coming months. You could join her and help the PG Newsletter become more than just a stats listing.

If you’re interested please email me using the contact page.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Along with the thousands of text files that Project Gutenberg has to offer there are also many audio recordings. For many people these are great ways to get to know the works of different authors.

Recently Michael Hart received a request from Tina Hansen,

I notice that your site offers a number of audio books, both human narrated and computer generated. I am pleased that you are adding more books read by voice talent. I wish to suggest that adding a human-narrated version of Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream would be of value to anyone visiting the site. You do have this done with an electronic voice, but I must be honest when I say that doing any Shakespeare play with an electronic voice just doesn’t sound the same as it does when you get a group of competent voices together. The electronic voices simply lack the nuances to make these works come alive for the reader. Instead, the listener is likely to dose off. Thus, I suggest that a call be put out for a version of this text done by competent actors. I’m sure that there are plenty of theater groups around the country who would be more than happy to take on this project. Thanks.

As the son of a Shakespeare professor Michael Hart was in complete agreement.

Therefore Project Gutenberg would like to put out a request for any persons or avid Shakespeare theatre groups to step forward and volunteer to make these.

If you are unsure on how to go about making these recordings then visit the LibriVox website. There’s lot of information on the website to help you get started.

Michael Hart, our founder, is looking for people who are willing to translate Project Gutenberg eBooks in and out of:

English
French
Spanish
Dutch
Portuguese
Italian

and any other languages you might like to include.

Michael Hart is looking for one of the original “IBM Memory Keys” that have evolved into our current RAMsticks, USBsticks, etc., or even the UK version that existed before that. It doesn’t have to be functional…he just wants it for comparison purposes. Please contact Michael at hart@pglaf.org if you might be able to provide one.

A four part series on the history of reading currently in production is looking for a Project Gutenberg volunteer to participate.
Ideally, this individual has had a long involvement with Project Gutenberg, has uploaded vast numbers of books, speaks passionately about the role of books in society and the need for universal access to texts [ergo Project Gutenberg] and has some compelling personal reason for their participation.

If at all interested, please contact Judy at jruzylo@sympatico.ca.

We would be looking to shoot in mid to late summer and would be happy to travel to where you are.

The films are being produced in Toronto with a French co-producer. The roster of stories is international. It is presently slated to air in the fall 2008 in Canada (in English and French), Australia, France, Netherlands and on a couple specialty satellite channels.

We have had some discussions with PBS as the American broadcaster but have no firm commitment to date.

Due to the incredible success of the “Trench on Words” review, which went straight into the Top-Ten of our “Most Popular” listings, we’d like to encourage more reviews and commentary materials on Project Gutenberg. If you know of any public domain reviews or if you wish to write your own review/recommendation on any of the e-texts in the collection, please use the email form on the contacts page.

Please visit the site: http://www.pgdp.net for more information about how you can help a lot by simply proofreading just a few pages per day, or more.

If you have a book that has been scanned, but not yet run through OCR (optical character recognition) or proofed, and you would like the Distributed Proofreaders to work on it, please email dphelp@pgdp.net and we will get things started.

Also, DP is seeking public domain books not already in the Project Gutenberg collection. To see what is already online, visit http://ibiblio.org/gutenberg/GUTINDEX.ALL (a text file) listing Project Gutenberg eBooks and is available for downloading.

Do you have Public Domain books you would like to see in the archive?

Can they be destructively scanned? If so send them to the Distributed Proofreading Team! Please email dphelp@pgdp.net with your geographic location. You will be given the address of the nearest high-speed scanner.

NOTE: High-speed scanning requires destruction of the book(s) which will not be returned. We have high-speed scanners currently located in the east, west and central portions of the US to make shipping easier.

Please make sure that any books you send are _not_ already in the archive and please check them against David’s “In Progress” list at: http://www.dprice48.freeserve.co.uk/GutIP.html to ensure no one is currently working on them. It would also be helpful if you obtain copyright clearance before mailing the books, and send the ‘OK’

lines to dphelp@pgdp.net

Do you like to work on an entire book at once but don’t have the time or technology to do the scanning, OCR, and initial proofing yourself?

Distributed Proofreaders has the perfect solution! Just send us email telling us that you are interested in post-processing and we will help find a project you would like to work on.

Please contact us at: dphelp@pgdp.netif you would like to know more about the Distributed Proofreaders.

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