Any Project Gutenberg Contributors Here?

Cafe Society
1

I see The Diary of George Templeton Strong is out of print. Leastwise, it is long out of copyright. I am toying with the idea of getting into Project Gutenberg. Frankly I have never downloaded, let alone uploaded anything there.

What are your thoughts?

How can I ensure nobody else is working on this book? What would be the best way to tackle such a beast?

2

I’m also curious how Project Gutenberg works. I regularly download books from there and sometimes I’d like to correct what are obvious optical character recognition (OCR) errors (e.g. “ram” gets interpreted as “rain”). But I don’t have a copy or scan of the actual book, so even if I knew how to make corrections (which I don’t), I’m not sure if it would be “ethical” to correct something without having the original.

3

I often download books from Gutenberg, but I’ve never contributed.

However, a good place to start may be the FAQs
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Category:How-To

There’s a Volunteers’ FAQ and a Volunteers’ Voices section.

4

I find PG not very welcoming. All I really need is an hour with someone on chat, or a good YouTube video. They have not published a newsletter in two years.

5

SDMB had an unofficial team for Distributed Proofreading at one point, I haven’t been active in a long time.

Join: DP: Login Required

6

Best way to contact Project Gutenberg, or best way to convert the book? Because converting a book is simple, just labor-intensive. Take a copy of the book. If you have a scanner amenable to book scans, use that. If not, cut the spine off the book and scan the individual pages. Run them through an OCR program. Spend hours and hours proofreading the OCR job. I don’t know about hoop-jumping for posting it on PG, but you can upload it yourself to Archive.org with no problem.

7

I fear someone else has done ‘my’ book, or may be doing it.

8

Have you read the Volunteer’s FAQ here? http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Volunteers’_FAQ

It includes the following:

To be clear, I haven’t contributed to Project Gutenberg myself. That’s just what I was able to find on their site.

Also, discussion lists are here:
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Subscribe_How-To

And contact info here:
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Contact_Information

9

Thank you, Tim.