Forty-Five Years of Digitizing Ebooks: Project Gutenberg's Practices — John Shaqi
Forty-Five Years of Digitizing Ebooks: Project Gutenberg's PracticesNewby, Gregory B.
History
Forty-Five Years of Digitizing Ebooks: Project Gutenberg's Practices
Newby, Gregory B.
Project Gutenberg
It was not until the mid-1990s that hypertext markup language (HTML) was
first used, and at the time it was decided that Project Gutenberg eBooks
should be wholly self-contained. A zip file would include all of the
needed images, and external links were discouraged.
Throughout the entire history of Project Gutenberg, volunteers have been
encouraged to work on items they are interested in, and to make their
own decisions about how to best represent the content.
PROOFREADING
The first eBooks were created by typing the text of printed books into
word processor or text editing programs, and then submitting the files
for final formatting and redistribution. Typists would perform basic
formatting, including:
Omitting page headers/footers and pagination;
Spelling correction (spelling modernization was optional,
and some transcribers preferred to leave the original
spelling);
De-hyphenation;
Relocating any footnotes to endnotes;
Adding basic markup or emphasis, as described above;
Standard formatting for headings and chapters. Chapter
titles would have two blank lines before, and one blank line
after;
Line and paragraph formatting, including line endings with
carriage returns + line feed at approximately 72 characters,
no paragraph indentation (unless it is a block quote or
similar), and a blank line between paragraphs.
Plain text eBooks, which were the only major format until HTML became
more frequent by the mid- to late-1990s, were designed to be viewed on
computer monitors with fixed-width fonts with 80-character lines. Plain
text is still provided for nearly all Project Gutenberg eBooks today,
although HTML and other formats are also provided.
Once an item is typed into an electronic file, and basic formatting
is completed, one or more rounds of proofreading will help to improve
quality. This includes typos, poor formatting, or inconsistency of
presentation. In practice, all eBooks published by Project Gutenberg
still have errors, even if they are far better than 99% accurate. For
example, an eBook that is 99.999% accurate (i.e., “five nines”) will
still have one wrong character in 10,000. That amounts to approximately
30 errors in a typical 50,000 word novel. Proofreading is, by
its nature, asymptotic. Subsequent rounds of proofreading improve an
eBook, but that eBook is still likely to contain some errors.
Errors in eBooks often reflect errors in their printed sources, and
Project Gutenberg encourages fixing those errors.
EVOLUTION IN PROOFREADING: DISTRIBUTED PROOFREADERS
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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