What could be better, right? Well, it's not as much fun as the town library book sale, when everyone comes out in droves, and you have the thrill of a good find and good people-watching besides, but I recently was pointed to Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page) by a friend. Not sure what the difference in titles/canon is between this project and, say, Google Book Search mentioned in Language Log today (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/).
Still, cool!
It's a really random collection of texts with outdated copyrights, so you can have them legally. Seems like a good idea. Here's what I don't get: you can volunteer to be a proofreader for Distributed Proofreaders, an organization which helps produce these online texts. I guess someone scans the book in, then it's read by a OCR program, then real people proofread and format the text, then it gets published online. Good. But, the aim of the game is supposedly to make as many texts available to the world as possible. So, why not just put up the scanned texts? Then we'd also get to see the text/page as published. Is it about searchability or file size? Does anyone here know?
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