Quote:
Originally Posted by ficbot
Harry, I would love to help with the 'good public domain editions' goal, but am not sure where to start. Do I download from Project Gutenberg and fix them in Sigil? Join the PG distributed proofreaders? Can you share a little more about your work process?
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Yes, download from PG, and then get hold of a printed edition of the book; you can generally find good PDF page scans at
http://www.archive.org. If I can't find one there, I buy a cheap 2nd-hand printed text from Amazon (an old battered one is absolutely fine for proofing with). Read the eBook and the scanned page in parallel and, whenever you find an error, make the correction in the eBook in whatever your favourite editor is (Sigil is fine for ePubs).
It takes a little practice to be able to read and compare two texts in parallel, but it's by far the best way to pick up errors, especially things of the order of missing commas, quotation marks, etc, which are by far the most common type of error in an eBook.
I'm currently proof-reading E.F. Benson's "Queen Lucia" and am finding at least a dozen errors on every page. There can easily be thousands of errors in an average length eBook.