Distributed Proofreaders


Distributed Proofreaders is a web-based project that supports the development of e-texts for Project Gutenberg by allowing many people to work together in proofreading drafts of e-texts for errors. the site had digitized 50,000 titles.

History

Distributed Proofreaders was founded by Charles Franks in 2000 as an independent site to assist Project Gutenberg. Distributed Proofreaders became an official Project Gutenberg site in 2002.
On 8 November 2002, Distributed Proofreaders was slashdotted, and more than 4,000 new members joined in one day, causing an influx of new proofreaders and software developers, which helped to increase the quantity and quality of e-text production.
In 2006, the Distributed Proofreaders Foundation was formed to provide Distributed Proofreaders with its own legal entity and not-for-profit status, separate from Project Gutenberg. The founding trustees were Charles Franks, Juliet Sutherland, and Gregory B. Newby.
In July 2015, the 30,000th Distributed Proofreaders produced e-text was posted to Project Gutenberg. DP-contributed e-texts comprised more than half of works in Project Gutenberg by 2009.

Proofreading process

DP servers are located in the United States, and therefore works must be cleared by Project Gutenberg as being in the public domain according to United States copyright law before they can be proofread and eventually published.
Public domain works, typically books with expired copyright, are scanned by volunteers or sourced from digitization projects, and the images are run through optical character recognition software. Since OCR software is far from perfect, the resulting text always includes errors. To correct them, pages are made available to volunteers via the Internet; the original page image and the recognized text appear side by side. Each set is presented to multiple volunteers to enter corrections, which results in a combined dataset that minimizes errors. This process distributes the time-consuming error-correction process with a method akin to distributed computing.
A post-processor combines the pages and prepares the text for uploading to Project Gutenberg.
Besides custom software created to support the project, DP also runs a forum and a wiki for project coordinators and participants.

Related projects

DP Europe

In January 2004, Distributed Proofreaders Europe started, hosted by Project Rastko, Serbia. This site had the ability to process text in Unicode UTF-8 encoding. Books proofread centered on European culture, with a considerable proportion of non-English texts including Hebrew, Arabic, Urdu, and many others., DP Europe had produced 787 e-texts, the last of these in November 2011.

DP Canada

In December 2007, Distributed Proofreaders Canada launched to support the production of e-books for Project Gutenberg Canada and take advantage of shorter Canadian copyright terms. Although it was established by members of the original Distributed Proofreaders site, it is a separate entity. All its projects are posted to Faded Page, their book archive website. In addition, it supplies books to Project Gutenberg Canada, and, where copyright laws are compatible, to the original Project Gutenberg.

Milestones

The source for many of these entries is the DP Timeline.
MilestoneDateE-text
First1 Oct 2000The Odyssey, Homer, Lang tr.
1,000th19 Feb 2003Tales of St. Austin's, P. G. Wodehouse
2,000th3 Sep 2003Hamlet — the 'Bad Quarto', William Shakespeare
3,000th14 Jan 2004The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton
4,000th6 Apr 2004Aventures du Capitaine Hatteras, Jules Verne
5,000th24 Aug 2004A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature, John William Cousin
10,000th9 Mar 2007
15,000th12 May 2009Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666, various, Henry Oldenburg
20,000th10 April 2011
25,000th10 April 2013The Art and Practice of Silver Printing, H. P. Robinson and Capt. Abney
30,000th7 July 2015Graded Literature Readers: Fourth Book
35,000th26 Jan 2018Shores of the Polar Sea, a Narrative of the Arctic Expedition of 1875–1876
40,000th10 October 2020All four volumes of London Labour and the London Poor
45,000th18 January 2023Down the Mackenzie and Up the Yukon in 1906, Elihu Stewart
50,000th7 December 2025A Dictionary of the Art of Printing

10,000th e-book

On 9 March 2007, Distributed Proofreaders announced the completion of more than 10,000 titles. In celebration, a collection of fifteen titles was published:
On April 10, 2011, the 20,000th book milestone was celebrated as a group release of bilingual books:
On 7 July 2015, the 30,000th book milestone was celebrated with a group of thirty texts. One was numbered 30,000:
  • Graded literature readers - Fourth book, editors: Harry Pratt Judson and Ida C. Bender, 1900

    40,000th e-book

On 10 October 2020, the 40,000th book milestone was celebrated with the completion of a four-volume work, London Labour and the London Poor, by Henry Mayhew.

50,000th e-book

On 7 December 2025, the 50,000th book milestone was celebrated with the posting of A Dictionary of the Art of Printing by William Savage.