“Who wants to read old books?” an education lobbyist asked me some months ago when I was trying to get her to speak out against the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.
But then Distributed Proofreaders–which has reached Unique Book Number 5050 and yesterday put online “50 diverse and significant written works consisting of over 13,000 pages” in celebration of the 5,000+ landmark–isn’t about being in vogue. It’s about preserving literature and history and finding out that, yes, Barry Lyndon might appeal to you as an adult without any pop quizzes on the horizon. Oh, and not to mention offbeat choices in the vein of Boy Scouts in a Submarine–hardly a literary classic but still a window into the mindset of the past. The cost of DP’s offerings on the Net? $0. This is “literature wants to be free” in the purest form.
Gutenberg’s heart and soul
Today Distributed Proofreaders is the heart and soul of Project Gutenberg, the main source of PG’s new editions. Until 2000, DP did not even exist, but it now has thousands of volunteers in the States and, via DP Europe, works with a like-minded organization across the Pond. DP scans in the classics and then uses volunteers to do proofing a page at a time, with many volunteers simultaneously at work on the same books–hence, the “Distributed.” DP volunteers reconcile the images of the pages with the actual text. With people checking up on each other’s work, the results are normally far, far more accurate than if just one volunteer proofed each book.
But back to this week’s celebration and those 13,000 pages. “A mere cursory reading of this wealth of titles stirs up a sense of excitement and wonder at what is possible when enough like-minded people join together in creative endeavor,” says Juliet Sutherland, DP’s executive director, speaking for herself and founder Charles Franks. Here is a list of the 50 celebratory titles:
5000 – Encyclopedia Britannica 11th edition, Vol II, Part I – AND-ANI
5001 – Expositions of Holy Scripture – Romans, Corinthians
5002 – Slave Narratives, a Folk History of Slavery, Vol. IV, Georgia, I
5003 – Bureau of American Ethnology Publications – The Romance of Laieikawai
5004 – TIA Children’s Library – Thrilling Stories of the Ocean
5005 – The Principal Voyages … of the English Nation, Vol. XII
5006 – General History & Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. XVIII
5007 – Historie de la R
