Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

Different people find their own ways into PG work, and once in, find their own niches. If you have your own ideas, don't let anything here stop you from pursuing them.

Some people just read the FAQs, go up to their attic, pull an eligible book off the shelf, send TP&V [V.25] in, and start typing or scanning. Next time we hear from them is when they send in [V.46] the completed eBook for posting. It can be as simple as that.

Some people just download existing PG texts, re-proof them very carefully and send in corrections.

Some people find regular collaborators through gutvol-d or the Volunteers' Board or the distributed proofing sites, earn a reputation as reliable proofers, and continue working as proofers.

Most people start small, and after a little experience of distributed proofreading or other proofing, begin their PG career as producers.

If you're a typist, cheer now, because you can ignore all the complicated paraphernalia of computer interfaces, and scanners, and the quality of OCR software and the mistakes it makes. You can just sit down at the keyboard with your eligible [V.18] book.

If you're not a typist, start thinking about scanners. It may be a while before you're ready to start scanning for yourself, but it's never too early to find out about them.

As soon as you have a solid grasp of how to turn a book into an etext, please start thinking about how you're going to become a producer. While proofing work is valuable, PG can only add books when someone makes the effort to actually make etexts from them, and the people who run distributed and co-operative proofing projects have to do a lot of work before and after the proofing step; we want to spread that around as widely as possible. Project Gutenberg needs more producers!

Whatever you do, _don't_ just hang around expecting someone to offer you a task to undertake. There is no "head office" where overworked staff occasionally need interns to do filing and odd-jobs. There are maybe 200 fairly regular contributors to PG, producers and significant proofers. We almost never meet each other in person. We have jobs, and families, and other interests. We work for PG when we can, and when we want to. In many ways, you could look at us as 200 unrelated people, each doing our own etext project, using Project Gutenberg as an umbrella group that sets loose standards, files copyright proofs and provides secure placement for the finished texts. Since we each have our own self-assigned single-person tasks, there isn't too much room to delegate some of that work to a beginner. By all means, volunteer for some tasks--on the Volunteers' Board, or in gutvol-d--but you should think in terms of defining your own tasks, and making your own contribution.

Orientation.

Absolutely everyone--scanners, typists, proofers--should first spend some time working on a distributed or co-operative proofing project. This will allow you to get a feel for what happens in making an etext from paper pages without committing you to more than a few hours' work.

This is not in any way an institutional requirement, since we don't have any institutional requirements, but it is very good advice. Many volunteers start eagerly, wanting to do lots of PG work, and then drop out because they took on too much, too fast, without understanding the nature of the work. Don't let that happen to you. Take it in small chunks.

Check out these distributed proofing sites:

Charles Franks: <https://www.pgdp.net/> JC Byers: <http://www.wollamshram.ca/1001/index.htm> Dewayne Cushman: <http://www.metalbox.net/dcushman/pgroot.htm>

and spend a few hours over a couple of weeks just processing some pages for real.

While you're doing that, you should also join a couple of PG mailing lists [V.12]--gutvol-d and either the weekly or monthly Newsletter list. Reading these will start to get you connected to what's going on. Browse the Volunteers' Board--there may be some offers going, and there's a lot of experience captured in some of those "back-issues", so don't confine yourself to the front page.

Inform yourself on e-text issues generally, not just within Project Gutenberg. Explore The On-Line Books Page and the IPL [R.5] and from them find other eBooks available on-line.

Have a look at our In-Progress List and some lists of suggestions from others [B.4].

Look at sites like Blackmask <http://www.blackmask.com> and Pluckerbooks <http://www.pluckerbooks.com/> and Memoware <http://www.memoware.com> and Bookshare <http://www.bookshare.org> to learn how our work is being used as a basis and copied and converted and amplified in many other projects.

Above all, READ a few Project Gutenberg eBooks! You don't have to read them in full; you don't need to spend weeks poring over Dostoyevsky or studying Shakespeare. Just download a few and skim them--you'll absorb what a PG text should be quite painlessly, and maybe you'll get caught up in the story! If you're looking for light reading, and can't think of something that you specifically want, how about these all-time favorites:

The Gift of the Magi, by O. Henry. The Lady, or the Tiger?, by Frank R. Stockton A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll Anne of Green Gables, by Lucy Maud Montgomery The Marvelous Land of Oz, by L. Frank Baum A Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs Heidi, by Johanna Spyri A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, by Mark Twain Black Beauty, by Anna Sewell Tarzan of the Apes, by Edgar Rice Burroughs Tom Swift and his Motor-Cycle, by Victor Appleton Rebecca Of Sunnybrook Farm, by Kate Douglas Wiggin Little Lord Fauntleroy, by Frances Hodgson Burnett Aesop's Fables Grimms' Fairy Tales The Art of War, by Sun Tzu Dracula, by Bram Stoker Swiss Family Robinson, by Johann David Wyss The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells

If you have a taste for detectives and mysteries, there's

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle Monsieur Lecoq, by Emile Gaboriau The Mysterious Affair at Styles, by Agatha Christie Arsene Lupin, by Edgar Jepson & Maurice Leblanc Edgar Allen Poe's "The Gold-Bug" and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" in The Works of Edgar Allan Poe V. 1

For the excessive buckling of various swashes, see:

The Prisoner of Zenda, by Anthony Hope The Man in the Iron Mask, by Dumas, Pere The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson The Scarlet Pimpernel, by Baroness Orczy

Effen youse got a hankerin' for a Western, there's:

Riders of the Purple Sage, by Zane Grey The Virginian, Horseman Of The Plains, by Owen Wister Back to God's Country, By James Oliver Curwood Selected Stories by Bret Harte Jean of the Lazy A, by B. M. Bower

Or if you prefer your fiction more domesticated, there's:

Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen The Warden, by Anthony Trollope The Heir of Redclyffe, by Charlotte M Yonge Mother, by Kathleen Norris

For something to raise a smile, you can rely on:

The Devil's Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce The Wallet of Kai Lung, by Ernest Bramah The Importance of Being Earnest, by Oscar Wilde Three Men in a Boat, by Jerome K. Jerome Piccadilly Jim, by P. G. Wodehouse

If poetry is your thing, you have lots to choose from:

Shakespeare's Sonnets Project Gutenberg's Book of English Verse The Home Book of Verse, edited by Burton Stevenson The Complete Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman

Now, that's just a handful from our over 5,000 eBooks, so don't tell me you can't find anything to read! If you do have ideas of your own, download GUTINDEX.ALL or PGWHOLE.TXT and browse through the whole list, or Browse by Author on the website at <http://promo.net/cgi-promo/pg/cat.cgi>.

Download a few. Read them on your PC, or reformat them and print them out, or convert them for your PDA. Get used to working with and formatting text. Look at the formatting decisions that earlier volunteers have made--they're not entirely consistent; different people make different choices, different books require different methods, and PG conventions have shifted slightly over the last 10 years--but they're all perfectly readable and convertible today.

If you find typos [R.26] in any of them, tell us! That's also a part of being a Gutenberg volunteer. Our eBooks _improve_ with time!

If you're thinking of making the best use of your time looking for errors in posted texts, a good start would be to download 40 or 50 texts, and run a spelling checker and gutcheck [P.1] on them all, spending only 5 or 10 minutes on each. Having had a quick look at all of them, concentrate on the ones that seem to have most problems--where automated checkers see 10 problems, a careful human will usually be able to pick up 20.

Getting Productive

OK, so you've seen what etexts should look like, you know what we do, and proofing hasn't scared you off. It's time to step up and become a producer. If you're not a typist and you don't have a scanner, take a detour down to the Scanning FAQ [S.1] now, and come back when your scanner is set up. If you're a typist or you've already got a scanner, read on . . .

Get a book. Just do it, OK?

Ya gotta start somewhere, right? And finding an eligible book is definitely somewhere.

Finding an eligible book is a threshold for many beginning volunteers--it's the first major step on the way to producing. For a lot of people, it's also the toughest barrier they have to cross. Fortunately, the barrier is only psychological, and can be crossed in a few minutes.

It's an unfamiliar process, and one that a lot of beginners feel some anxiety about. Don't. It's quite straightforward: it's just buying a book--you've done that, haven't you? Don't over-think it, don't worry about whether you're making the "right" choice, don't spend months comparing lists and choosing. Just do it. Once you've got your first, you'll wonder what all the fuss was about. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, your book can be on its way to you in an hour if you have $20 to spend.

Typists blessed with a good local library don't even have to buy their books--they can just borrow one and type it up! (You may be able to scan a library book, but get some experience with scanning first, and avoid damage!)

Let's deal with the decisions and other issues of picking one.

_Copyright_

For your first book, don't try getting fancy with copyright issues. Choose one that was published before 1923, and you're in the clear for U.S. and PG copyright purposes. You can read the dates just as well as we can--with books printed before 1923, there are no hidden catches: "Pre-'23 is free". Just read the TP&V [V.25] of the book, and see that it was printed before 1923, and you have no problems. Of course, reprints [V.19] of books copyrighted pre-1923 (and various other cases) are also clear, but if you have any concerns, just stick to pre-'23 editions.

_Which book?_

The answer to this question is different for everyone, but see how much you agree with the following statements:

"I have a favorite book, and I'd really like to produce that."

Well, hey, this is no problem! You already know what you want. Go check out whether the book is already on-line [V.29].

"I'd like to work on an important book, but I don't know which."

Well, everybody's definition of "important" is different, but some people have put their various ideas forward already; you can see whether you agree with them! The InProg List contains some, with the notation "Suggested book to transcribe" beside them. Steve Harris keeps a list of unproduced possibles at Steveharris.net. John Mark Ockerbloom's "Books Requested" page lists titles that people have asked for. [B.4] Your problem if you fall into this category is that other people probably wanted to produce "important" books too, and lots are already done.

"I just want an easy, trouble-free book to start with."

Your first book doesn't have to be War and Peace (we've already got that anyway!). Here's a tip: try looking for children's or what we would nowadays call "Young Adult" books. These are typically short, and may have large print, which makes life much easier if you're scanning. They age well: children's stories from a century or more ago are still readable and interesting to children today. We have many children's and YA eBooks: not just the classics like Grimm and Andersen and Heidi and Oz and Peter Pan and William Tell, but lesser-known but still enchanting stories like The Counterpane Fairy, or Lang's Fairy books. There are series, like the Motor Girls, or the (Country) Twins series, or the Bobbsey Twins. There is lots and lots of material here for you to start with, and these books are relatively plentiful, since they were made to take the kind of treatment children dish out, and many of them have been in school libraries or attics for years.

Whatever your choice, pick a book that you'll like; you'll be living with it up close and personal for a while. Light reading, adventure fiction, and books aimed at younger readers are safe first choices for most people. If you admire 19th Century scientists or scholars, and want to immortalize their work, great! But don't feel that you have to dive in at the deep end just because someone else wants you to.

_Getting your book: a practical exercise_

The Search

At this point, you've got a list of books--maybe just one, maybe several by an author or two, maybe just a genre like "Children's Books" with some specific ideas. Maybe your mind is still wide-open.

Before used booksellers had the Net, finding a particular old book was a daunting job. Booksellers had informal networks among themselves and exchanged catalogs so that each would know something about what was available elsewhere, but, for a buyer, finding a particular book was still hit-and-miss. Now, however, a number of large sites provide a service to booksellers, where they can list their inventories for people to search from anywhere.

So now we go hunt for them on the Net. No, you don't have to buy them on the Net--you can rummage in booksales and garage sales and used bookstores, and that's its own kind of fun, though on a physical hunt, what you need is to bring a long list of "already done" books with you. But even if you never buy over the Net, it's a vast source of information about what books are available, which are plentiful, and which are cheap. It gives you some experience of what to expect when you do your in-person browsing.

Here's a story of a typical Net-hunt. And you can follow along with it at home. :-) Your results, and the sites you end up at, will be different from mine, but even if you don't end up buying a book on this hunt, you'll get some experience of what's involved. C'mon, do it with me--see if you can find a better bargain!

I'm starting with two lists, and I'll follow up whatever seems promising. I'd like to spend about $20--might go to $30. Definitely not interested in $50 and up. I'm keeping in mind that I'll have to add a bit for delivery--usually up to $10 within the U.S., but can get expensive if you're in Perth, and ordering from a bookstore in Munich.

I'm also avoiding anything that might be tricky to clear on this search, and confining myself to books printed before 1923.

Of course, by the time you read this, some of these books may already have been produced, so if you're actually thinking of buying any, check carefully first!

My first shortlist consists of books that caught my eye from David Price's In-Progress List, Steve Harris's site, and The On-Line Books Requested page [B.4], and it reads:

Louisa May Alcott: The Inheritance
E. W. Hornung: Irralie's Bushranger
E. W. Hornung: Stingaree
A. A. Milne: The Dover Road
A. A. Milne: Once on a Time
Samuel Richardson: Pamela
Oscar Wilde: The Critic as Artist

As well as following along with my list, you should try finding two or three books of your own, from those sites or from your own preferences, and search for them in the same ways that I do.

Everyone has their own searching technique and their own favorite sites to search. For this session, I'm opening up three copies of my browser--one for Alibris <http://www.alibris.com>, one for Abebooks <http://www.abebooks.com>, and one for the Catalog of the Library of Congress <http://catalog.loc.gov>. I'll do my initial searches on Alibris and Abebooks, and keep the LoC site handy for reference.

In Alibris, I head straight for the Advanced Search page, since they allow searching by date, and I immediately put "before 1923" into every search, which avoids having to scan through modern reprints. In Abebooks, I choose "Hardcover" in their advanced search, which is not quite as good a filter, but does at least screen out recent paperback editions.

In each of the sites, I just enter the author's surname and one word from the title of each book, and look at the search results.

Louisa May Alcott's "Inheritance" looks like it's going to be tough. I don't find it in either of my two bookstores. On doing a little checking with modern bookstores, I find it was her first novel, written when she was 17, and as far as I can see, not published during her life: apparently only recently published--the LoC site has nothing prior to 1997. A disappointing start to my search. I understand why it's very desirable to get it online, but this one's going to be very tough to clear, and I'm staying away from it.

E. W. Horning's "Irralee's Bushranger" is also elusive: it doesn't show up at either of my sites, so I check out the LoC to confirm I have the title right, and yes, there it is: "Irralee's Bushranger, a story of Australian adventure, 1896." So I widen my search by visiting <http://www.trussel.com/f_books.htm> and searching many of the sites there. Still no luck. If I were particularly eager to get this book, there are several things I might do at this point: I might register a "want" with one of the sites, asking to be notified when a copy is listed, I might use the OCLC WorldCat search (which Abebooks calls "Find it at a local library") where I can locate libraries that have copies, or I might even contact some individual booksellers and make a request that they look for it. Some booksellers actually specialize in looking for hard-to-find books; but of course I expect I'd have to pay a bit more for it when they do find it, and given my success with the rest of my list, and my price bracket, there seems no need to go that far today.

Horning's "Stingaree", by contrast, seems to be everywhere, in several editions, and cheap. It must have been a bestseller in its day--not surprising, from the author of "Raffles". 1902, 1905, 1909 editions abound. The cheapest are 1910 and 1907 editions for $4.95 and $5.00 from booksellers listed at Abebooks.

Milne's "Dover Road" is available from both sites. There seems to have been a Putnam's printing in 1922 of "Three Plays: The Dover Road. The Truth About Blayds. The Great Broxopp." of which lots of copies survive. There also seem to be later printings which would qualify as reprints if I were desperate, but the 1922 edition is priced from $12.00 to $50.00, so I'll take the 1922 $12.00 copy from Abebooks. As a bonus, I don't see the other two plays listed as being online anywhere, so I'll get three texts (and short ones, too!--279 pages for all three) for the price and effort of one.

Milne's "Once on a Time" is a bit less common, but once again a Putnam's printing of 1922 keeps it in the race. There are a couple of booksellers in England selling for 15 pounds (which just about makes my $20 threshold) and 20 pounds, and an ex-library copy going for $25.

There are lots of eligible copies of "Pamela" available, ranging from a fourth edition at a mere $4,999 (no, thanks!) to a 1921 printing at $6.60 at Alibris. I'll take that one, please.

Wilde's "Critic as Artist" is fairly widely available. A 1905 edition of "Intentions: the Decay of Lying; Pen Pencil and Poison; the Critic as Artist; the Truth of Masks" is available at Alibris for $8.80, (and other copies of the same edition there and on Abebooks in the $20-$30 range) and Abebooks lists a London 1919 edition at $12.50. There are several copies listed in both places as "undated" and "reprints"--I'm avoiding these, since while it's quite likely that they might be clearable, I'm not taking risks on this search.

My second list isn't a list--just a vague category: children's books that are easy to do.

I go to Alibris' Advanced Search, and enter "Child's" in the title, and pre-1923 in the date, and, excluding titles already on-line, immediately get:

A Child's History of France $13.20 A Child's Story of the Bible $5.50 First Lessons in Botany or The Child's Book of Flowers $13.20 The Child's Book of American Biography $11.00 The Child's First Bible $8.80 The Child's Music World $8.80

and so on through quite a list.

OK. That's a good start. But my choice so far is unimaginative. I need better search terms. So I go to main search engines with the terms "children's antiquarian books" and find a half-dozen or so sites that specialize in them. I can browse around there, though it's slower going without searches to focus my results. I find <http://www.bookrescue.com>, specializing in children's books. Wading through the miles and miles of Alcotts and Barries and Burnetts, which are mostly already online, I think, I find a couple of authors from them who must have been popular, because they seem to have published lots of books before 1923: Angela Brazil and Dorothy Canfield. (I only got as far as the "C"s!)

I could of course stop here and buy some, but today I want to see what else is out there.

Back at Alibris and Abebooks, armed with my authors to search by, I turn up 4 pre-1923 books under $20 for Angela Brazil:

A Terrible Tomboy The Youngest Girl in the Fifth A Fourth Form Friendship A Pair of Schoolgirls

and several between $20 and $30.

Dorothy Canfield immediately yields multiple copies of:

The Brimming Cup Home Fires in France Hillsboro People Understood Betsy Rough Hewn The Real Motive

and others, and I haven't even got to $20 yet, nor to the letter "D".

A browse through the Ebay Collectible and Antiquarian Books section also throws up a respectable list of eligibles. I won't even bother counting that.

In 20 minutes, I have found five of the seven on my search list. In less than hour after that, I found over 16 eligible children's books, all under or around $20 and all available online.

Before committing to one, though, I would double-check that the book hasn't been transcribed online, and isn't In Progress.

Double-checking your selection

If you're concerned that the book you have chosen duplicates another that might be in progress, and want to double-check, you can e-mail the Posting Team asking them to check whether any recent clearances have come in for that title.

Duplications do happen--there's no way of avoiding them when different people are making independent decisions--but they are rare.

Dealing with used booksellers

As a class, used booksellers are very pleasant people--remarkably friendly, knowledgeable and helpful, even to people buying on a typical Gutenberger's budget.

Some of them are not, however, models of ideal data organization when it comes to Internet listings. There are lots of one- or two-person operations dealing with an inventory of many thousands of books, and having located your book online, you should check that it's still available.

You can place an order through the site and wait for the confirmation, or you can simply call the bookseller. Not all booksellers' contact details are listed, so it's not always an option, but when you do phone you're likely to be speaking immediately to someone who can tell you for sure whether the book is still there, can pull the book off the shelf and answer questions about it, and can take your credit card details on the spot and dispatch the book immediately.

Copyright Clearance

As soon as your book arrives, send us the information needed for Copyright Clearance first. Even if your book is a true-blue, no-questions-asked pre-1923 edition, we should know about it as soon as possible so that it can go onto the In-Progress list for others to see that someone has started on it.

Wait for the confirmation e-mail before starting any serious work. Some people have thought that "Copyright 1923" plus some wishful thinking would be good enough, and, unfortunately, it isn't. Some people have gone ahead and produced the whole book before sending in the clearance, only to be disappointed, all their work wasted.

Books published in 1922 or earlier are clearable, but some people, ever optimists, overlook that little "1927" in small print on the verso. Sometimes there is no copyright date on the front, and other optimists assume that these books are OK. They may be; they may not be. Don't get caught in the copyright trap.

As soon as you have what you think might be an eligible book, do not start on it. Do not ask another volunteer's opinion. Just send in the TP&V and wait for the confirmation e-mail to find out for sure.

Even when your TP&V clearly says "Copyright 1901", send it in. We need to get it into the clearance files so that we can register it as being In-Progress.

Producing

If you're a typist, there's not much more you need to know from this point: you can just get on with the job, with maybe a few tips from the FAQ. In fact, if you're a typist, you might wonder why the rest of us make such a fuss about scanners, and settings, and OCR. Take pity on us! we just can't produce the way you can. Smile indulgently, ignore all the scanner jargon, and submit your completed text while we're still saying bad words about the guttering on a greyscale image of page 372. :-)

If you are using a scanner to copy a book for the first time, be patient with yourself. Some people start off with too high expectations of what they can achieve. Believe it or not, scanning does work effectively; it just doesn't work perfectly. And often, you need a little practice before your scans work right with your OCR. The Scanning FAQ [S.1] has lots of specific tips you can try. Start by scanning a double-page about a third of the way through the book. Scan in Black and White and in Greyscale, at 300dpi and 400dpi. Try 600 dpi if it seems like a good idea. Put it through your OCR and see what comes out. Move your scanner so that you can be comfortable while placing the book and turning pages. Allow yourself an hour to experiment with different settings, and different pages. Put the sample images included with the Scanning FAQ through your OCR and see how the output compares to the text produced by other packages. That first hour finding out about how your setup works will be the most valuable hour of scanning you will ever do.

Having figured out what settings you want to use for this book, make sure you implement the best speed you can. Usually this means telling the scanner to scan _only as much area as the book covers_. This is quite important, since the scanner will by default scan its whole area, and you don't need all that; it just wastes time and makes your images bigger.

You may also be able to set your OCR or scanner software to auto-scan pages with some preset delay, like 5 seconds. This also speeds things up, because the scanner isn't waiting for you to hit the keyboard, and you have both hands free at all times to turn the page and replace the book. It takes a few pages to get into the rhythm; if you miss a page-turn, don't worry--you can get it on the next scan.

Using a reasonably modern but quite ordinary home/office type flatbed scanner, you should be able to scan 200 pages an hour [S.9] of a typical book, at good quality. 400 pages an hour is not unheard-of. Now, it may fairly be said that scanning offers all the fun of ironing, without the sense of adventure :-), but if you have got your settings right, you will probably be able to do the whole job in less than two hours. And now you're really on the road!

V.2. What experience do I need to produce or proof a text?

None.

For producing, you will have to be able to type pretty well, or have a scanner.

For proofing someone else's text, when you don't have a copy of the book in front of you, you should be reasonably familiar with the language used in the book, and the styles of the time--Chaucer's English was quite different from ours, and even 19th Century novelists write some phrases unfamiliar to us today.

That's it. You don't need experience in publishing, editing, or computers.

V.3. How do I produce a text?

There are acres of words in this FAQ about that, but it all boils down to 4 simple steps:

1. Get an eligible book--pre-1923, or one of the exceptions. Pull
it from your attic, borrow it from a library or a friend, buy it
in your local bookstore, in a flea-market or on-line. We don't
care which.
2. Send us a copy or the front and back of the title page so we
can file proof of copyright clearance.
3. Copy the text from the book into a computer text file. We don't
care whether you type it, scan it, voice-dictate it, or think of
some totally new way to do it. Just get it into a file.
4. Send us the computer text file.

That's all there is to it!

V.4. Do I need any special equipment?

You need the use of a computer of some kind, and Internet access is usual, though we have had some volunteers contribute texts on floppy disks.

If you intend to scan books, you will need a scanner, but if you're just typing or proofing you won't.

V.5. Do I need to be able to program?

Absolutely not! Very little of Project Gutenberg's work involves programming, and it is never necessary to any part of volunteering.

V.6. I am a programmer, and I would like to help by programming.
What can I do?

At the risk of sounding facetious, the very best thing you can do is figure out ways that more programming can help Project Gutenberg!

A lot of programmers work on PG books, and anything easy has probably already been done. The challenge for programmers who want to write something that will help to produce etexts is not in writing the code; it's in identifying ways that programs can help.

Please see the FAQ "What programs could I write to help with PG work?" [P.2] for some ideas in this direction. Whatever you do, don't just hang around waiting for someone to ask you to write something, because that's not going to happen. Think up a project, ask volunteers if they would use it, and dig in! Better still, produce a few etexts yourself, using the existing tools, and get a feel for the kinds of problems that new software could help with.

Apart from text production, we do develop some programs to help with posting work, but as of mid-2002, we have nothing like an ongoing programming project which people can join.

V.7. What does a Gutenberg volunteer actually do?

We buy or borrow eligible books, scan, type, and proofread. There are a few other activities, but they consume only a very small fraction of volunteer time.

V.8. Can I produce a book in my own language?

Yes! We want to encourage people to produce books in all languages, and we cheer when we can add a new language to the list.

V.9. Does it have to be a book? Can I produce pieces from a magazine
or other periodical?

Magazines, newspapers, and other publications are just fine. For copyright clearance, they work just the same way as a book.

You do need to check the length of your piece [V.17]; we don't want a zillion separate one- or two-page files. If the piece you have in mind isn't long enough, you can add other pieces to it, or even most or all of the magazine. If the work was serialized over multiple issues, you can join them together for your PG text, but you do have to copyright clear every issue of the magazine from which you copy material.

If you have lots of old periodicals, you could even take one piece from several, and make a new text which is a "theme" anthology of those pieces. You can give it an appropriate title: "Civil War Commentaries from X magazine 1892-1898."

V.10. Do I _have_ to produce in plain ASCII text?

Certainly not if it doesn't make sense. To take an extreme example, if you're working in Japanese or Arabic, or creating audio files, there is no point in trying to reproduce that in ASCII!

Where the text can largely be expressed in ASCII, we do want to post an ASCII version, even if it is somewhat degraded compared to the original. However, we will post your file in as many open formats as you want to create, so that your original work is available for those who have the software to read it.

V.11. Where do I sign up as a volunteer?

You don't. We have no formal sign-up process, no list of volunteers, no roll-call. If you produce a PG eBook, or help to produce one, you are a volunteer.

V.12. How do PG volunteers communicate, keep in touch, or co-ordinate work?

We are very scattered geographically: U.S., Australia, Brazil, Taiwan, Germany, South Africa, Italy, India, England, and all over the world, so we can't really meet for coffee on Thursdays. :-)

Most co-operation and co-ordination goes on by private e-mail. This is efficient for volunteers who have worked with each other before, since they know each other's interests and skills, but not so easy for beginners to break in on, since they don't.

The Volunteers' Web Board at <http://promo.net/pg/vol/wwwboard/> is a publicly accessible forum for volunteers or potential volunteers to post any question or information about how to create a PG eBook.

There are a few Project Gutenberg mailing lists. Information about joining them is available on the main site, at <http://promo.net/pg/subs.html>.

The Project Gutenberg Weekly and Monthly Newsletters, gweekly and gmonthly, are one-way announcements, which allow PG to communicate with non-volunteers who are interested in the eBooks we produce, but they also contain notes and requests for assistance from volunteers.

The Volunteers' Discussion Mailing list, gutvol-d, is a an e-mail discussion forum for subscribers about any Gutenberg topic.

The Volunteers' List, gutvol-l, is for private announcements for active volunteers.

The Programmers' List, gutvol-p, is for discussion of programming topics.

There are some other, specialized, closed lists for people who do specific work within PG:

The "Posted" List, posted, is for people who perform indexing on our texts. An e-mail is sent to this list every time we post a text (see the FAQ "How does a text get produced?" [V.16] section 5: Notification) and the members of the list use it to update their catalogs.

The Whitewashers' List, pgww, is for Posting Team internal messages.

The Heroic Helpers List, hhelpers, is for people who can devote some fairly regular time to doing odd jobs.

V.13. Where can I find a list of books that need proofing?

There is no central list of this kind. There are distributed proofing projects, currently at

Charles Franks: <https://www.pgdp.net/> JC Byers: <http://www.wollamshram.ca/1001/index.htm> Dewayne Cushman: <http://www.metalbox.net/dcushman/pgroot.htm>

where you can proof parts of a book. This is advisable when you're just starting out because it gives you some feel for what the work is like.

You can also look up existing, posted texts from the archives and proof them. Just as there always seems to be one more bug in any given program, there always seems to be one more typo in any given text! Download a few, and scan quickly for problems by doing a spellcheck or other automated check; if you can find any problems quickly, then there are likely others to be discovered by a careful proofing.

V.14. Is there a list of books that Project Gutenberg wants?

No. Project Gutenberg, as such, does not "want" any specific books. Individual volunteers choose what books to produce. Nobody gives orders to volunteers about what they should work on. Nobody has an official "hit-list" of books to add to the archives.

Of course, individual volunteers and non-volunteers have their preferences, and may suggest books to transcribe, and such suggested lists pop up every so often, and are often useful to people looking for ideas.

There are usually some suggestions in David Price's InProgress list. The On-Line Books Page has a section where people can list requests, and Steve Harris has a site devoted to lists of books not yet in Gutenberg or elsewhere. Treat all of these lists with some caution, since someone may have started or even finished one of their suggestions since they were last updated.

PG Books In Progress <http://www.dprice48.freeserve.co.uk/GutIP.html> On-Line Requested List <http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/in-progress.html#requests> Steve Harris' "To-do"s <http://www.steveharris.net/PGList.htm>

V.15. I have one book I'd like to contribute. Can I do just that without
signing up?

Well, since there is no formal sign-up, of course you can! A lot of texts have been contributed by people who just wanted to immortalize one favorite book. Many of them had already created the eBook before they even heard of Project Gutenberg, and we're always delighted to add these to the archive!

About production:

V.16. How does a text get produced?

As stated back in the Basics section, all you need to do is:

Borrow or buy an eligible book. Send us a copy of the front and back of the title page. Turn the book into electronic text. Send it to us.

That's all you actually need to know in order to be a producer. But if you're interested in the details of how other people actually do this, and want to know what else happens behind the scenes, here's a full, blow-by-blow account.

1. Finding an eligible book

Volunteers find eligible books [V.18] in all sorts of ways. Some lucky people have them in their bookshelves, or their attic. A lot of people have a good library nearby, where they can find books, or request them on interlibrary loan. Some people are big eBay fans; others like to hunt for bargains on specialist booksites. And of course lots of volunteers enjoy rummaging through actual used bookstores, or local markets, or yard sales.

Even if you're not going to take on a book yourself right now, search for some on the Net and find out about how to get a copy. Next time you pass an antiquarian bookstore, or a book market, drop in and browse. Ask your local library about interlibrary loans. Eligible books aren't hard to find once you know where to look.

2. Copyright Clearance

New volunteers sometimes find it hard to understand why this is so important, and why, in particular, Project Gutenberg is so careful about it. At base, it's simple: by keeping a filed copy of the TP&V [V.25] of every book we produce, we can at any time protect our publications against claims from publishers that they "own" the work, and thus we can keep them available to the public.

The copyright laws can be difficult to understand, and sometimes it may take serious research to prove that a particular edition is actually in the public domain. If you're not legally-inclined, just keep repeating "Pre-'23 is free" if you're in the U.S.A. and stick to books published before 1923. If you do want to delve deeper, read our Copyright Rules page at <https://www.gutenberg.org/vol/pd.html> and then go on to reading the Library of Congress Copyright Office official papers at <http://www.copyright.gov/>. If you're in another country, find out about your own copyright laws.

Volunteers send in the TP&V from the book for us to inspect. This not only gives us the proof to file, it also lets us know that someone is really working on the text so that we can list it as being In Progress for the information of others who might be interested.

3. Scanning, typing, proofing and editing

This makes up the bulk of PG's effort, and is discussed at great length elsewhere in this FAQ. There are many, many ways to create an etext from a paper book, and different people use different methods, but it all boils down to making a text file. For a typical book, it will probably take 40 hours of a volunteer's time. All that happens here is that somebody makes the effort to transcribe one paper book into a file that can be shared around the world and for all time.

4. Posting

[Note: this information is quite specific to the process we go through now. It is quite likely to change as we improve the automation of the tasks.]

Posting is done by the Posting Team. The basic job is to receive the text from the producer, check that it has been copyright cleared, check that it conforms to Project Gutenberg standards, check it for correctness (which can be anything from XML validity to simple spelling), add the Project Gutenberg header and copy the text to the two PG servers.

In a simple case, where everything goes right, this can take as little as fifteen minutes. In a complicated case, where we have to convert formats, or there are a lot of errors in the text, or there are problems with the copyright clearance, it can take hours or even days while we wait for responses, or do a lot of editing, or find conversion tools.

Michael Hart used to do this work entirely alone, but in September 2001, he created the Posting Team to handle the load. (The Posting Team are nicknamed the "Whitewashers" in honor of Tom Sawyer's victims. :-)

Transferring the file

You send the text to us [V.46] either by Web, by FTP with a username and password that any of the Posting Team can give you privately), or by e-mail.

If you're FTPing, you should e-mail one or more of us as well, to let us know what you've uploaded.

One problem is files that don't transfer correctly. Especially by e-mail, some files get damaged on the way. It's better to ZIP the file before sending, if possible, to prevent some common problems with text files. The use of compression formats other than Zip can also create problems. Members of the Posting Team work on multiple platforms--DOS, Windows, Linux, Solaris--and zipping and unzipping programs are commonly available for all of these. Other compression methods, like Stuffit or bzip2, are not so readily available, and may give us trouble.

We login via ssh to beryl, which is the Unix system on which we work when posting, the same one that you FTPed the file to, unzip the file and glance at the top of it.

Checking Clearance.

We then check it for copyright clearance. The one and only absolute rule that we NEVER bend, no matter what, is that we WILL NOT post a file that doesn't have a clearance. If it ain't in the clearance files, it don't get posted.

Most regulars know that they should include their clearance line in the e-mail submitting the text, but not everybody does, and not everybody remembers every time. This can be frustrating, when clearance is not included and not obvious.

When Michael gives you your clearance on a book, he sends you back an e-mail that has just one line, something like this:

The Works Of Homer [Iliad/Odyssey] Tr. George Chapman Jim Tinsley 06/14/01 ok

He saves these lines in files that we posters can access. We regard this information as private, so we don't publish the details of who has cleared what.

When we get the text, we check whether the submitter has cleared it. If there is a clearance line in the e-mail notifying us about the text, there's no problem. If we can find the title of the text under the submitter's name in the clearance files, there's no problem. Unfortunately, sometimes we can't find it. There are two usual reasons: either the text submitted is _part_ of the work cleared (for example, submitting one play from a collection), or the text hasn't been cleared yet. If the clearance isn't straightforward, we can go back and forth and round and round in e-mails for a while.

This is why it's a good idea to paste the clearance line into your e-mail.

If the title of the text you're sending isn't the same as the title of the text cleared, BE SURE to paste in the clearance line AND explain that the text you're sending is PART of the cleared book. Please also list the titles of the other parts; it really does cause confusion and delay when this is not clear.

Checking and Editing

Sometimes, people send in a book in a non-text format like Word Perfect or Microsoft Word, or send a text with unwrapped lines. In that case, we try to get the submitter to fix them, but if they can't, we have to convert the file to straight text before starting.

Some producers, particularly inexperienced ones, want to add non-standard annotations and mark-up and symbols to the text. This can get ticklish; we don't want to discourage them, but we need to keep texts reasonably standard. Usually, we can work something out. Maybe the book should be added in _both_ text and HTML, for example.

Assuming that it's a plain text file, we next run gutcheck and a quick spellcheck on the file. This will tell immediately if it adheres to PG standards and if there is any serious problem with it.

If the file looks clean, we may skim it, looking for potential problems or formatting issues. For clean texts, the only things we usually need to change are unindented quotations or inconsistent chapter headings (a lot of people seem to mix "CHAPTER III" with "Chapter 14" and have irregular numbers of blank lines) or spacing and a few 8-bit characters. Occasionally, we have to rewrap a text. We also look out for included publishers' trademarks, which we normally prefer to remove (trademarks are NOT subject to copyright expiration: Macmillan(TM), the publishing house, is still around and trading), unnecessary or downright odd indentation or centering, stray page numbers, and prefaces or introductions or appendices that may not be in the public domain. If the file has lots of 8-bit characters, we probably need to make a separate 7-bit version, and post both.

If the gutcheck and spellcheck don't look clean, or if conversion is required, we may spend a lot more than 15 minutes on it. In a bad case, we may have to get the file re-proofed.

If you are conscious that you're doing something non-standard, and really mean it to stay, say so in your e-mail. (For example, I recently posted a text containing a family-tree representation that had lines over 80 characters. Now, I would have left that one alone anyway, but it helped that the submitter drew my attention to it in the e-mail.) If it's too non-standard, the poster may not allow it to stay, but at least you can discuss it. When a text needs a lot of non-standard formatting or markup, you really need to ask yourself whether you shouldn't be submitting it in HTML, with all the bells and whistles, and settle for something more normal in the text variant.

Mostly, errors are obvious, and there are at least some obvious errors in most texts. When errors are completely obvious, we just fix them without feedback to the producer unless you have specifically asked for feedback in your e-mail.

We're getting more HTML formats now, which is great, but incoming HTML often needs a lot of work, because people who are not experienced with HTML often make mistakes. The W3C <http://validator.w3.org> is the official standard for valid HTML, but, for the average volunteer, it's awkward to use. However, if you're submitting a HTML format, please use Tidy, which you can get from <http://tidy.sourceforge.net>, to check your text before sending it.

Header and Footer

We add the PG header and footer. If there is a header and footer already there, we strip them off first, since recent changes in the header mean that a lot of people send files with headers that are out of date. We have written programs to help with this.

We get the number for the text from a program on beryl called "ticket" that Brett Fishburne wrote, that dispenses the next number. That way, if two or three of us are posting at the same time, we won't all grab the same number. We create a 5-letter base filename, checking that it hasn't been used before, and finally zip up the file.

Posting

We now transfer the .ZIP and .TXT files to two servers: ftp.ibiblio.org and ftp.archive.org. (This is usually the point at which we realize that we forgot to make a change we noticed while checking. Aaaargh!)

5. Notification

At this point, the book is posted, but nobody knows about it! We need to do something about that. . . .

We compose an e-mail to the "posted" e-mail list, cc: the producer, with the line that is to go into GUTINDEX.ALL, the master list of PG files.

The "posted" list has only a few subscribers. These are the people who index and create links to PG texts, and include both PG volunteers and the maintainers of other sites that link to PG texts.

They also commonly download the texts to get more information for their indexes, and tell us if there is anything wrong with the files.

This e-mail is simply the official notification to all these people and the producer that the file has been posted. Here's a sample of such an e-mail:

To: "Posted Etexts for Project Gutenberg" <[email protected]> Subject: [posted] Posted (#5301, Duncan) ! From: "Jim Tinsley" <[email protected]> Date: Tue, 25 Jun 2002 06:21:27 -0400 (EDT) Cc: [email protected]

Mar 2004 The Imperialist, by Sara Jeannette Duncan [SJD#4][mprlsxxx.xxx]5301

There may also be some remarks, if the text is in any way non-standard, or if files other than plain text were posted with it.

From this e-mail, you can, if you want to see any corrections made, immediately download the posted file and compare it to your version. Since the notification is made _after_ the file has been copied to the servers, it should be there waiting for you.

To find out how to download a book that has just been posted, see the FAQ "How can I download a PG text that hasn't been cataloged yet?" [R.3]

6. Indexing

From the "posted" list, the posting line is added to GUTINDEX.ALL and our indexers begin the cataloging process, which is much more thorough, for the website. This includes work like finding author's dates of birth & death, getting the Library of Congress classification, and the other information that makes up the website searchable index. That process takes extra time, which is why the website searchable catalog must always lag behind the actual titles posted.

7. Corrections

It's remarkable how many people who went over and over the text to the point of hating it suddenly see problems with it when they download it a couple of days after it's posted! Something psychological there, I expect. Anyhow, if you do download your text and see problems with it, don't worry, just e-mail whoever posted it, or any other member of the Posting Team. No, you're not stupid, or if you are, you're in good company, because we've all done it! There's no big deal about replacing the posted file with a corrected copy immediately.

Over time, other readers may submit corrections. If you find an error in a PG etext, see the FAQ "I've found some obvious typos in a Project Gutenberg text. How should I report them?" [R.26]

When the corrections are small, as most are, we will just make the change to the existing text. If there are a lot of changes, we may post a new edition [R.35] with a new edition number; e.g. if the file abcde10 was corrected, we may post abcde11. We never make a new edition when we get corrections immediately after posting.

V.17. How long must a text be to qualify for PG?