The Trustees of Distributed Proofreaders Foundation are concerned about a new international agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The TPP will result in significant copyright term extensions in signatory countries, which will have the immediate impact of slowing or halting growth of the public domain in many parts of the world. The agreement was drafted in secret. Public scrutiny and consideration are now needed for copyright term extension, and many other aspects of the agreement. The Trustees of Distributed Proofreaders are against further copyright term extensions in any country, and encourage all people who benefit from public domain materials to make their opinions known to their lawmakers. The TPP is passed, but is not yet ratified in any country. There is still time to stop implementation of the TPP. The Distributed Proofreaders Foundation is in favor of, and will continue to support, initiatives by Project Gutenberg or the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (PGLAF) to mitigate the impact of the TPP on the public domain.
Follow the Distributed Proofreaders Blog on Twitter:
Distributed Proofreaders provides a web-based method to ease the conversion of Public Domain books into e-books. By dividing the workload into individual pages, many volunteers can work on a book at the same time, which significantly speeds up the creation process.
During proofreading, volunteers are presented with a scanned page image and the corresponding OCR text on a single web page. This allows the text to be easily compared to the image, proofread, and sent back to the site. A second volunteer is then presented with the first volunteer's work and the same page image, verifies and corrects the work as necessary, and submits it back to the site. The book then similarly progresses through two formatting rounds using the same web interface.
Once all the pages have completed these steps, a post-processor carefully assembles them into an e-book, optionally makes it available to interested parties for 'smooth reading', and submits it to the Project Gutenberg archive.
Donate to the Distributed Proofreaders Foundation.
Registered volunteers may contribute to Distributed Proofreaders in several ways including proofreading, "smooth reading" pre-released e-books to check for errors, managing projects, providing content, or even helping develop improvements to the site. Volunteers may also join other members of our community in our forums to discuss these and many other topics.
Volunteering at Distributed Proofreaders
It's easy to volunteer at Distributed Proofreaders. Simply register as a volunteer. Once you've confirmed your registration by e-mail, you'll receive an introductory e-mail with basic instructions on how to log in and use the site. Then, you're ready to sign in and start learning to proofread or visit the smooth reading page to pick an e-book to read! Wherever you go, you'll find lots of information to help you get started. Please try our Walkthrough for a preview of the steps involved when proofreading on this site.
There is no commitment expected on this site beyond the understanding that you do your best. Spend as much or as little time as you like. We encourage you to proofread at least a page a day and/or smooth read a book as often as your time allows, but it's entirely up to you.
We hope you will join us in our mission of "preserving the literary history of the world in a freely available form for everyone to use."
Distributed Proofreaders regrets that we are unable to verify court-ordered community service because our system cannot adequately record time spent participating.
Distributed Proofreaders was founded in 2000 by Charles Franks to support the digitization of Public Domain books. Originally conceived to assist Project Gutenberg (PG), Distributed Proofreaders (DP) is now the main source of PG e-books. In 2002, Distributed Proofreaders became an official PG site. In May 2006, Distributed Proofreaders became a separate legal entity and continues to maintain a strong relationship with PG.
Copyright Distributed Proofreaders (Page Build Time: 0.387) Report a Bug
33,231 in Completed.![[XML]](http://www.pgdp.net/c/graphics/xml.gif){kind=small}
![[RSS]](http://www.pgdp.net/c/graphics/rss.gif){kind=small}
2,228 In Progress.
661 in Proofreading.
