Why I Like GreenCine

Because they let me know that Hot Summer, an East German beach musical profiled in the documentary East Side Story, is available on DVD. Having it is one thing; pointing out that they have it is cool.

Scanning and Post-Processing

I talked about Distributed Proofreaders before. It's a cooperative way for people to proofread public domain texts before they go into Project Gutenberg and become available free to anyone in the world. Once a book is scanned in and uploads it to the Distributed Proofreading site, volunteers work together to proofread the book. The volunteers are shown an image of a single page at a time, along with the OCR text produced by that page, and can type in any necessary corrections. You can do as many pages or as few as you like. After the book has gone through two rounds of proofing, a post-processor takes the complete book, does one final pass of proofreading, reformats it, and uploads it. In the case of inexperienced post-processors, a more experienced volunteer takes a look at it before releasing it to Project Gutenberg.

I uploaded my first post-processing job last night, With the Turks in Palestine by Alexander Aaronsohn, the memoir of a Jew in Palestine during World War I. It was written as Zionist propaganda and is largely devoted to condemning Arab and Turkish corruption. Fairly interesting, and worth making available.

At the end of the month, I plan to start scanning in my own books. I've ordered the HP ScanJet 4600 See-Thru Flatbed Scanner, which has the advantage that it scans from above, which means that when you're scanning a book you can just lift up the lid and flip the page, instead of having to pick the book up. (I also bought some OCR software, which cost almost as much as the scanner.) I've already started gathering public domain books in my library. It's harder than you might think to find books that you can scan, because DP generally won't take reprints of public domain books if the publisher claims a copyright. If the book is obviously an exact facsimile, they might make an exception, but otherwise they aren't going to risk a lawsuit. (And of course in some cases the publisher's copyright is legitimate, e.g., abridgements.) I looked through a couple used bookstores, but again, books published before 1923 aren't as easy to find as one might expect. I did buy a copy of Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls, a 1910 tract against white slavery, and I ordered a few books through abebooks.com, and I found some reprints that don't claim a copyright, so I have enough books to keep me busy for a while.

This is a good hobby. It's very satisfying to spend my time on something worthwhile.