Each time you go to the website, you choose the book you want. Pages of the book appear side by side in two forms – one the scanned image and the other the text produced by OCR (optical character recognition) software. You compare the two and make corrections. OCR is usually 99% accurate, which makes for about 10 corrections a page. You save each page you do and can then either stop work or do another. All the books are proofread twice (the second time only by experienced proofreaders) before the final version is ready for the public (after which any further errors noted by readers are systematically corrected). You don’t have any quota to fulfill, but it’s recommended you do a page a day if possible. It doesn’t seem much but with hundreds of volunteers it really adds up. In 2003, on the original site of Distributed Proofreaders, about 250-300 people were working each day, producing a daily total of 2,500-3,000 pages, the equivalent of two pages a minute. Volunteers can also work independently, by digitizing a whole book in any word-processing programme or else scan it in and convert it into text using OCR software and then make corrections by comparing it with the original. In each case, someone else will proofread it. [These two articles appeared in French ("Michael Hart, ou la volonté de changer le monde par le biais de l'ebook" & "Project Gutenberg: quelques réponses à vos questions") in Edition Actu nos. 90 and 91, of 15 February and 1 March 2004. Edition Actu is the electronic newsletter of CyLibris (distributed free every fortnight) which aims to look at publishing from a different angle. CyLibris, founded in Paris in August 1996 and a pioneer of online publishing, was the first French publisher to use the Internet and digitization to bring out literary works.] Copyright © 2005 Marie Lebert End of Project Gutenberg's Project Gutenberg (1971-2005), by Marie Lebert