From time to time we come across public domain books we want to publish on this site, but the ebooks aren't available at Project Gutenberg or other free sources. For that reason we're teaming up with Marc D'Hooghe at http://www.freeliterature.org/ to digitize and proofread texts for inclusion in our own ebook catalog as well as for Project Gutenberg's.
How you can help
We welcome volunteers for proofing as well as suggestions for new proofing projects. If you have a suggestion for an book for our catalog but the text is not available at Project Gutenberg please contact us with the title, author, and original publication date of the book. If you would like to volunteer, please also contact us. Our proofreading initiative proofs whole books at one time. If you are interested in helping but can't commit to proofing a whole book, you can also volunteer at Distributed Proofreaders where they proof one page at a time.
Instructions for proofreading projects Since we're new to proofreading texts for inclusion to Project Gutenberg, please read this proofing summary which is very useful visual example of the formatting rules. In this summary, on the left you see the un-proofed text as you might get it straight from the OCR scanner. On the right is the scan of the actual page in the book. The content are the rules for texts proofed for PG. One of the most important rules to take note of is to keep the line breaks as they are in the original. One minor change from the instructions at the link above--please place tags before and after italicized words (the instructions say to remove this markup). Example:
Put markup around an <i>italicized</i> words. This makes it <i>easier</i> to format to html and other ebook formats that support it.
In the final formatting of the text, these tags will be converted to "_" for the plain text version of the ebook.
Finished projects
Below is a list of our finished proofing projects and their links to our and Project Gutenberg's catalog.
The Sylph, by Georgiana Cavendish (Girlebooks, Project Gutenberg)
proofers: Heather Carroll, Laura McDonald, and Clare Graham