In Honour of the 14th Anniversary of LV, plz proofread and make ebooks on PG written by fourteen different writers?

Everything except LibriVox (yes, this is where knitting gets discussed. Now includes non-LV Volunteers Wanted projects)
DACSoft
Posts: 1981
Joined: August 17th, 2013, 8:51 am
Location: Connecticut, US

Post by DACSoft »

Hi Eunah Choi,

It can be readily seen by your previous posts that you are passionate about the topic, which is commendable.

As a volunteer at both LibriVox (LV) and Distributed Proofreaders (DP), the biggest supplier of ebooks to Project Gutenberg (PG), I thought it might be helpful to let you know that your ebook requests were forwarded to DP (not by me, but by another dual volunteer). Many of the Project Managers over there will review the DP forum, Books I'd like to see in PG - 2019 (referenced above), when they are looking for good candidates to transcribe.

As a volunteer as both sites, I'd like to weigh in on a few points. My experience at DP includes managing/producing over 150 ebooks with the DP team for PG, and supports many of the opinions already mentioned.

Volunteering at LV and DP/PG entails two very different skillsets. Many who enjoy and are good at producing audio recordings do not enjoy, or are not good at, producing ebooks ... and vice-versa.

At DP, project managers have various tastes in the type of books they enjoy managing. Do not be surprised if the books you are passionate about do not elicit the same passion in others, but generally there are diverse interests at DP.

Producing an ebook is an often long and involved process, with many sub-skillsets, including content processing (digitizing a physical book, or harvesting on-line images, running the OCR, putting the page images in a format that the DP team can work on), project management (overseeing a project through the production workflow), volunteers proofing (3 rounds) and formatting (2 rounds) the text for quality assurance and finding errors in the text, and post-processing (combining all the pages from the rounds into an ebook for submission to PG in text and HTML formats).

The minimum amount of time I've seen to produce even the "simplest" ebook from start to finish is 1-2 months. The workflow for difficult ebooks or those with little interest can take years. So any expectation that the quality ebooks produced for PG can be done at the snap of a finger is unrealistic, and patience (not instant gratification) is the standard in the production of ebooks (as it is with producing audio books ... as anyone knows who has gone through the editing process). :D

I hope this (rather long) post helps, along with the posts of others above, in the understanding of the differences in LV and DP/PG, and that the call for ebook requests is better done at DP and PG.

Don
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