I've been pounding away the past few days at Project Gutenberg, getting books proofread, so much so that I am now in the top 800 proofreaders (which I'm very proud of). The last book was a real pain in the ass as the index was completely wrecked and I had to rebuild it from scratch - all 12 pages of it. The OCR scanner/ reader is basically a very good tool that does a highly accurate job of scanning the pages and turning them into typeable (is that a word??) text but nevertheless, it IS fallible. If the print quality is very bad, the OCR scanner makes an educated guess and half the time, it cacks it up. So that's where a proofreader like me comes in and corrects it manually. Extremely interesting work but also extremely detail-oriented and you have to be a real nit-picker.

People often ask me how I gain enjoyment out of a voluntary job like this and I always reply that I believe in the ideals and aims of PG, plus you can't really cherry-pick what you want to do and not want to do. You either do the whole job properly or don't bother doing it at all. Indexes, contents, bibliographies and footnotes may not exactly be the sexiest parts of a book but they are still part of the book nonetheless. They can't be excluded just because they are a pain in the ass to check.

Saying that though, I am hoping to find a good mystery novel to do next, something light on the mind. I was doing some Edgar Wallace recently which was extremely fun. So perhaps a murder mystery, detective story or even a western would be a good change of pace.