Jim Tinsley

“ As soon as you have a solid grasp of how to turn a book into an etext, please start thinking about how you're going to become a producer. While proofing work is valuable, PG can only add books when someone makes the effort to actually make etexts from them, and the people who run distributed and co-operative proofing projects have to do a lot of work before and after the proofing step; we want to spread that around as widely as possible. Project Gutenberg needs more producers!
Whatever you do, don't just hang around expecting someone to offer you a task to undertake. ”

“ DO YOU WORK ALONE, OR DO YOU SHARE THE WORK OF EACH TEXT? DOES ANYONE REGULARLY HELP YOU PROOF THE TEXT? I generally work alone, however my wife will proof sometimes. She has become interested in the book that I am working on at present and is waiting for me to supply her with more pages. When I was getting started, a new volunteer agreed to proof something for me (she approached me) but then she never did any of it and didn't even e-mail me to advise that she had changed her mind. Editing and proofing is not for everybody and one needs to find out if one likes doing it. ”

“ Among the most important things PG does is preventing this creeping perpetuation of copyright by proving, once and for all, that a particular edition of a particular book is in the public domain, so that it can never be locked up again as the private property of some publisher. We do this by filing a copy of the TP&V, the title page where the copyright notice must be placed, so that if anyone ever challenges the work's public domain status, we can point to a proven public domain copy. ”

“ Now, my idea is to make the text as readable as possible. For me that means correcting type-setting errors I notice. Others prefer to leave them intact. In the end, I don't believe the readers care. I have found them generally to be very grateful to have found some treasure they had been seeking. In some cases of an author's more obscure works, they didn't even know the book existed, a rare find indeed for them.
It is so satisfying to receive an e-mail from someone thanking you for all your hard work. ”

“ The immediate and major exception to this is when you are typing a text written in a language like French or German that requires accents.
There is a problem with using non-ASCII characters. They do not display consistently on all computers; in fact, they do not even display consistently on the same computer! On my computer, for example, what looks like an e-acute in this editor just shows as a black box in another editor, or even using a different font in the same editor. And this is by no means confined to some theoretical minority; we have to deal with it all the time when posting texts. ”

“ Not long after I started associating with PG, Michael Hart posted an e-mail to the volunteer discussion group, advising of the death of a long-time volunteer. It seemed like she had been one of the "family".
One really needs to be indifferent to praise and the prospect of reward to start volunteering for PG. There is certainly no money in it. However, one quickly finds that there is a community of people out there with a common interest, and with the same outlook and the same interest in doing a job well, without tangible reward. ”

“ When a text needs a lot of non-standard formatting or markup, you really need to ask yourself whether you shouldn't be submitting it in HTML, with all the bells and whistles, and settle for something more normal in the text variant. ”

“ The most significant "defensive formatting" practices are indenting unwrappable text like quotations, and using underscores rather than CAPITALS for italics. Different volunteers have different priorities: at one extreme, some people want to make the best plain text they can, giving no weight to conversion issues; at the other, some people emphasize the cues that will allow automatic reformatters to convert the texts well, even if that causes some ugliness in the plain text. Most of us operate somewhere between, making the choices we feel are best depending on the context. ”

“ Some very productive volunteers manage to turn out an e-text a week; some books can take a year or more.
Scanning itself doesn't take too long. Even if it takes you as much as two minutes per page to scan, you will still complete a 300 page book in 10 hours, and you will probably be scanning much faster than that [S.9] . The problem is that the text generated by the scanner and your OCR package is usually faulty. There are many cute scanner errors, mistaking b for h, or e for c, so that "heard" is scanned as "beard" or "ear" as "car". Makes the story more interesting sometimes! ”

“ Be cautious with recent, powerful word-processors that "auto-correct" text, or use "smart quotes" or any other such automatic retyping or formatting feature, since they can Do Bad Things to your e-text without your consent! When using any such package, it is best to switch off any feature that makes changes without asking you.
Two utilities which may come in useful are a spell-checker and a version difference checker. These may be built into your word processor, or you may have them as separate packages.
A spell-checker is like a chain-saw: a powerful tool, but one to be used very carefully. ”

“ Poetry is easy to format: just be sure to use a non-proportional font, and make it look as much like the text as possible. To avoid ragged-looking centering, left-align titles.
In a whole book of poetry, there is no need to leave an indentation before every line; unlike a verse lost in fields of prose, there is little danger that someone will wrap it by mistake. ”

“ Capitalization of the first word is often used in printed material to emphasize the break at the start of a section or chapter on the paper, but it is not necessary in an eBook, and leads to the same kind of ambiguity as does the capitalization of italics, and for far less reason.
If you feel you really must capitalize the first word, we probably won't stop you, but if so, please do it consistently throughout the book, not just in one or two places, so that a future reader can be certain that these capitalized words were a chapter-head convention, and not otherwise intended for emphasis. ”

“ OK, so you've seen what etexts should look like, you know what we do, and proofing hasn't scared you off. It's time to step up and become a producer. If you're not a typist and you don't have a scanner, take a detour down to the Scanning FAQ [S.1] now, and come back when your scanner is set up. If you're a typist or you've already got a scanner, read on . . .
Get a book. Just do it, OK?
Ya gotta start somewhere, right? And finding an eligible book is definitely somewhere.
Finding an eligible book is a threshold for many beginning volunteers—it's the first major step on the way to producing. ”

“ But like every other new job, it just takes time to learn the ropes.
The actual process of posting now takes very little time: I can go through the necessary steps in 3-5 minutes. But posters are the last line of defense against errors, and even the most careful volunteers make them (and yes, we do too!) . It takes a minimum of 15 minutes to run standard checks on a perfectly clean file, and it can take several hours to fix up a file that needs help. On average, it takes me about an hour to do my reasonable best for every text submitted. ”

“ Being a software developer, people were always asking me about the internet and web sites, in the mistaken belief that I knew ALL about computers. I decided to get an idea of how web page design and web site management worked by creating a site that listed all of the "Australian" content at PG. When I couldn't find anywhere to put the Orwell, which I had recently proofed, I decided to create a page on my site for etexts in the public domain in Australia, so that Australians and internet users in other countries with similar copyright laws, could read and/or download them. ”

“ Being able to edit the file is also important. We make corrections to our editions constantly, and it is important to us that we should be able to update our files easily. If adding one word to a sentence involves a complete re-marking of the whole text and a complete rebuild of the file, we have to ask ourselves whether this format is really necessary for this text. Further, the people who re-use our texts should also be allowed to copy and reformat them freely, and non-editable formats restrict their ability to do this in various ways. ”

“ There is a trade-off between characters and entities: entities do not limit you to any particular character set, but characters are directly readable when looking at the HTML source.
Within entitles, there is also a trade-off between entity names and numbers: older browsers may not recognize some of the entity names, but the entities do make the text work in multiple character sets. Which you choose is entirely up to you, but it's best to be consistent; if you like entities, use them everywhere. ”

“ There are many ways new folks can join in, from scavenging old books at yard sales all the way up to proofing files or scanning and typing in whole books. When you send in your first copy of title page and verso, be patient — it takes time for your copyright research to be done. This is a great time to do proofing on-line at one of the distributed proofreading web sites. ”

“ The Internet is a wonderful medium for finding used and antiquarian books—used bookstores all over the world have found ways of co-operating and listing their inventories on the Net, so that whether you live in Los Angeles, Moscow or Perth, you can still find that book you're looking for in a shop in a laneway of Amsterdam. Most on-line listings will quote the publication year of the book, so you can check that it's pre-1923. ”

“ There is lots and lots of material here for you to start with, and these books are relatively plentiful, since they were made to take the kind of treatment children dish out, and many of them have been in school libraries or attics for years.
Whatever your choice, pick a book that you'll like; you'll be living with it up close and personal for a while. Light reading, adventure fiction, and books aimed at younger readers are safe first choices for most people. If you admire 19th Century scientists or scholars, and want to immortalize their work, great! ”

“ Whenever a set of etexts is published and distributed by only one person or organization, there is a danger that their etexts will disappear from the Net sometime. We want all etexts to be spread as widely as possible, copied as much as possible, so that no one event or loss, or whim of a sponsor, can obliterate them.
We think that the PG collection is, for that reason, the safest place to put a text for its long-term survival. There are copies of the PG archives all over the world, on public servers and private CDs. PG publications are widely converted, collected and read on PDAs. ”

“ Where a simple, standard PG-ASCII layout does not, in your view, "adequately express the content", you should think of making your text in another open format, perhaps HTML or XML or TeX, that allows you to use more characters, more formatting options, and images. We are always happy to accept these kinds of files. In these cases, you should also provide a standard PG-ASCII version, even if you feel it is unacceptably degraded, for those who cannot use your preferred format. ”

“ There is no "head office" where overworked staff occasionally need interns to do filing and odd-jobs. There are maybe 200 fairly regular contributors to PG, producers and significant proofers. We almost never meet each other in person. We have jobs, and families, and other interests. We work for PG when we can, and when we want to. In many ways, you could look at us as 200 unrelated people, each doing our own etext project, using Project Gutenberg as an umbrella group that sets loose standards, files copyright proofs and provides secure placement for the finished texts. ”

“ Typists typically have few mistakes in their texts, but the errors that they do make tend to be hard to spot. Proofing OCRed text has its quirks, and you can expect many, many errors to correct.
The only thing that all proofers agree on is to differ in their methods. Some people scan and almost complete the proofing process within their OCR package, others do no editing at all within their OCR. Some spell-check first, others spell-check last. Some work through in one pass, doggedly line by line, others make several light passes. Some start at the end and work backwards! ”

“ What role does proofing play in Project Gutenberg?
A very big one!
Typists' work doesn't usually need many corrections, but unfortunately, scanners and OCR packages are far from perfect, and scanned text varies from "almost-right" down to "maybe I should consider typing instead of scanning". Proofing is the process that turns a scan into a readable e-text.
Proofing a typist's work is straightforward; you just read it, and keep an eye out for mistakes. ”

“ For producing, you will have to be able to type pretty well, or have a scanner.
For proofing someone else's text, when you don't have a copy of the book in front of you, you should be reasonably familiar with the language used in the book, and the styles of the time—Chaucer's English was quite different from ours, and even 19th Century novelists write some phrases unfamiliar to us today.
That's it. You don't need experience in publishing, editing, or computers. ”

“ Every volunteer brings his/her own particular interests and skills to PG and that, together with the democratic approach taken by the small executive team, is what makes PG the strong, co-operative organisation that it is. My interests and skills, and a generous dose of serendipity, led to the creation of Project Gutenberg of Australia. ”

“ Anyone can write a reader or creator for an open format, and in 500 years' time, anyone interested will still be able to write a program to display the file. Closed formats, by contrast, will almost certainly be unreadable in just a few decades, when the companies now promoting them disappear, or lose interest, or decide to stop supporting them because they want to sell a replacement. ”

“ When a text is in the public domain, it belongs as much to you as to anyone.
(However, when some character or part of the work is also trademarked, as in the case of Tarzan, it may not be possible to release new works with that trademark, since trademark does not expire in the same way as copyright. If you propose to base new works on public domain material, you should investigate possible trademark issues first.) ”

“ In 2002, plain vanilla ASCII is still readable everywhere, but people also want to convert our texts into other formats for more convenient loading on readers and web sites. We therefore have to keep in mind that our works will be processed by automatic conversion programs, none of which is perfect, and we have evolved some "defensive formatting" practices, which, while retaining the universality of plain text, also supply clues to automatic converters about how they should treat the layout. These do help to keep converters from making at least the worst mistakes. ”

“ Do different people really re-create the same eBooks?
It does happen, but mostly by accident. Anyone experienced in eBook creation will first search the usual places to see whether anyone else has already transcribed the book they're interested in. If it has been transcribed, they will not duplicate the effort.
Etexts that are in the public domain very often float around the Net for years—stored in a gopher server here, posted to Usenet there, held on someone's local computer for a year or two and then reformatted as HTML and uploaded to a web site somewhere else. ”

“ If you are using a scanner to copy a book for the first time, be patient with yourself. Some people start off with too high expectations of what they can achieve. Believe it or not, scanning does work effectively ”