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Old 04-15-2011, 05:26 AM   #408
John the Miner
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John the Miner began at the beginning.
 
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Join Date: Mar 2011
Device: Eco e-reader
My point is that the proofreading trade, these days, is a lost art which disappeared when newspapers dispensed with proofreaders.
When old-fashioned paper books which were out of copyright became available on the net as ebooks, scanned directly by OCR technology into electronic files which were then able to be downloaded by anyone who wanted them, the need for careful checking of the words disappeared just as surely as the old-time "correctors of the press" did.
The results of that decision are plain to see in newspapers and in the etexts.
There is no doubt that Project Gutenberg has all the best warm and fuzzy feelings in bringing electronic texts to the masses in the easiest, cost-free way, but I think its means of doing this are fraught with danger when they farm out texts to what they call "distributed proofreaders" to check the manuscripts they distribute. I wonder just how many of these DPs are trained proofreaders and editors?
How many of the members of the team would be able to pick up style differences between page 3 (let's say) of an ms and page 279 (let's say) of the same ms if they were just given odd chunks of it which didn't include those pages to read?
How many buyers of electronic books can spot the differences when they read the ms? And how many take the time to point out those literals to the owners of the sites?
And how many times are those mistakes corrected?
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