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Screenshot of the proofreading interface on Distributed Proofreaders.
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Type of site | Not-for-profit |
|---|---|
| Available in | 2 languages |
List of languages | |
| Country of origin | United States of America |
| Owner | Distributed Proofreaders Foundation |
| Founder(s) | Charles Franks |
| General manager | Linda Hamilton |
| Parent | Distributed Proofreaders Foundation (DPF) |
| URL | www |
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | Optional |
| Launched | 2000; 24 years ago (2000) |
| Current status | Active |
Content license | Public Domain |
| Written in | PHP[1] |
| OCLC number | 1087497129 |
Distributed Proofreaders (commonly abbreviated as DPorPGDP) is a web-based project that supports the development of e-texts for Project Gutenberg by allowing many people to work together in proofreading drafts of e-texts for errors. As of December 2023,[update] the site had digitized 47,000 titles.[2][3][4]
Distributed Proofreaders was founded by Charles Franks in 2000 as an independent site to assist Project Gutenberg.[5] Distributed Proofreaders became an official Project Gutenberg site in 2002.
On 8 November 2002, Distributed Proofreaders was slashdotted,[6][7] and more than 4,000 new members joined in one day, causing an influx of new proofreaders and software developers, which helped to increase the quantity and quality of e-text production. In July 2015, the 30,000th Distributed Proofreaders produced e-text was posted to Project Gutenberg. DP-contributed e-texts comprised more than half of works in Project Gutenberg, as of July 2015[update].
On 31 July 2006, the Distributed Proofreaders Foundation was formed to provide Distributed Proofreaders with its own legal entity and not-for-profit status. IRS approval of section 501(c)(3) status was granted retroactive to 7 April 2006.
Public domain works, typically books with expired copyright, are scanned by volunteers, or sourced from digitization projects and the images are run through optical character recognition (OCR) software. Since OCR software is far from perfect, many errors often appear in the resulting text. To correct them, pages are made available to volunteers via the Internet; the original page image and the recognized text appear side by side.[8] This process thereby distributes the time-consuming error-correction process, akin to distributed computing.
Each page is proofread and formatted several times, and then a post-processor combines the pages and prepares the text for uploading to Project Gutenberg.
Besides custom software created to support the project, DP also runs a forum and a wiki for project coordinators and participants.
In January 2004, Distributed Proofreaders Europe started, hosted by Project Rastko, Serbia.[9] This site had the ability to process text in Unicode UTF-8 encoding. Books proofread centered on European culture, with a considerable proportion of non-English texts including Hebrew, Arabic, Urdu, and many others. As of October 2013[update], DP Europe had produced 787 e-texts, the last of these in November 2011.
The original DP is sometimes referred to as "DP International" by members of DP Europe. However, DP servers are located in the United States, and therefore works must be cleared by Project Gutenberg as being in the public domain according to U.S. copyright law before they can be proofread and eventually published at DP.
In December 2007, Distributed Proofreaders Canada launched to support the production of e-books for Project Gutenberg Canada and take advantage of shorter Canadian copyright terms. Although it was established by members of the original Distributed Proofreaders site, it is a separate entity. All its projects are posted to Faded Page, their book archive website. In addition, it supplies books to Project Gutenberg Canada (which launched on Canada Day 2007) and (where copyright laws are compatible) to the original Project Gutenberg.
In addition to preserving Canadiana, DP Canada is notable because it is the first major effort to take advantage of Canada's copyright laws which may allow more works to be preserved. Unlike copyright law in some other countries, Canada has a "life plus 50" copyright term. This means that works by authors who died more than fifty years ago may be preserved in Canada, whereas in other parts of the world those works may not be distributed because they are still under copyright.
Notable authors whose works may be preserved in Canada but not in other parts of the world include Clark Ashton Smith, Dashiell Hammett, Ernest Hemingway, Carl Jung, A. A. Milne, Dorothy Sayers, Nevil Shute, Walter de la Mare, Sheila Kaye-Smith and Amy Carmichael.
| Milestone | Date | e-text | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| First | 1 Oct 2000 | The Odyssey, Homer, Lang tr. (first pages for proofreading) | [10] |
| 1,000th | 19 Feb 2003 | Tales of St. Austin's, P. G. Wodehouse | |
| 2,000th | 3 Sep 2003 | Hamlet — the 'Bad Quarto', William Shakespeare | |
| 3,000th | 14 Jan 2004 | The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton | |
| 4,000th | 6 Apr 2004 | Aventures du Capitaine Hatteras, Jules Verne | |
| 5,000th | 24 Aug 2004 | A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature, John William Cousin | |
| 6,000th | 2 Feb 2005 | The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, Sir Walter Scott | |
| 7,000th | 23 Jun 2005 | Opúsculos por Alexandre Herculano (Vol. I), Alexandre Herculano; Viage al Parnaso, Miguel de Cervantes; Leabhráin an Irisleabhair-III, Various. | |
| 8,000th | 8 Feb 2006 | The Suppression of the African slave-trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870, W. E. B. Du Bois | |
| 9,000th | 8 Sep 2006 | History of the World War for Human Rights, Kelly Miller; Poems, Christina Rossetti; Hey Diddle Diddle and Baby Bunting, Randolph Caldecott | |
| 10,000th | 9 Mar 2007 | (See 10,000th E-book below) | |
| 11,000th | 12 Sep 2007 | Northern Nut Growers Association Thirty-Fourth Annual Report 1943, Northern Nut Growers Association | |
| 12,000th | 26 Jan 2008 | Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens, Sigmund Freud | |
| 13,000th | 24 Jun 2008 | A World of Girls, L. T. Meade | |
| 14,000th | 1 Dec 2008 | The Art of Stage Dancing, Ned Wayburn | |
| 15,000th | 12 May 2009 | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666, Various. Henry Oldenburg (editor) | |
| 16,000th | 1 Oct 2009 | ABC Petits Contes, Jules Lemaître | |
| 17,000th | 4 Mar 2010 | The Position of Woman in Primitive Society, C. Gasquoine Hartley | |
| 18,000th | 15 Jun 2010 | Area Handbook for Romania, Eugene K. Keefe, et al. | |
| 19,000th | 10 Nov 2010 | Vanden Vos Reinaerde Uitgegeven en Toegelicht (anonymous) | |
| 20,000th | 10 April 2011 | (See 20,000th E-book below) | |
| 22,000th | 2 Jan 2012 | "The Nibelungenlied", William Nanson Lettsom's translation | |
| 25,000th | 10 April 2013 | The Art and Practice of Silver Printing, H. P. Robinson and Capt. Abney | |
| 30,000th | 7 July 2015 | Graded Literature Readers: Fourth Book | |
| 35,000th | 26 Jan 2018 | Shores of the Polar Sea, a Narrative of the Arctic Expedition of 1875–1876 | |
| 36,000th | 7 September 2018 | American Missionary | |
| 37,000th | 16 April 2019 | French Painting of the 19th Century in the National Gallery of Art | |
| 38,000th | 8 November 2019 | The Birds of Australia (Vol. 3 of 7) | |
| 39,000th | 27 April 2020 | Wilhelm Hauffs sämtliche Werke in sechs Bänden. Bd. 6 | |
| 40,000th | 10 October 2020 | All four volumes of London Labour and the London Poor[11] | |
| 41,000th | 5 March 2021 | Clara Barton's The story of my childhood[12] | |
| 42,000th | 3 August 2021 | Carry On, Jeeves | |
| 43,000th | 31 January 2022 | Die Sitten der Völker, Zweiter Band[13] | |
| 44,000th | 19 July 2022 | The trial of Émile Zola[14] | |
| 45,000th | 18 January 2023 | Elihu Stewart's Down the Mackenzie and Up the Yukon in 1906[15] | |
| 46,000th | 3 July 2023 | The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (the Child Ballads)[16] | |
| 47,000th | 20 December 2023 | The Betty Crocker Picture Cooky Book[4] |
On 9 March 2007, Distributed Proofreaders announced the completion of more than 10,000 titles. In celebration, a collection of fifteen titles was published:
On April 10, 2011, the 20,000th book milestone was celebrated as a group release of bilingual books:[17]
On 7 July 2015, the 30,000th book milestone was celebrated with a group of thirty texts. One was numbered 30,000:[18]
