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Eric Eldred, plaintiff in historic copyright case, updates us and shares the lowdown on the Erik Dorn e-text
September 16, 2007 | 4:44 pm
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By David Rothman
Just what does it mean when a book says at the front: “E-text prepared by Eric Eldred and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team”? Did one guy do much or most of the scanning and other work?
Not necessarily. Check out a nice little thank-you note that Eric himself wrote after reading in the TeleBlog about Erik Dorn, a novel by Ben Hecht of Front Page fame.
In this digitization project, the e-book Eric got top billing even though he modestly says he was just one of hundreds of volunteers. Yes, coincidentally, this is the same Eldred who was the plaintiff in the Supreme Court fight against the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.
Credit for top 25 volunteers?
Even if Eric or another hardworking volunteer was the star by far, might there be a way for PG and/or Distributed Proof Readers to give credit in a book to the top twenty-five people who clocked in the most time? Or maybe the top five?
Perhaps names of the top five and the other 20 could appear at the back of the book, along with the URLs of their Web sites if they had them.
Delay of several years
Elsewhere in the note, Eric mentions that he actually worked on Erik Dorn several years ago. He does not “know why it took so long to process, and I’m rather surprised to see it emerge.”
Given Hecht’s fame as coauthor of The Front Page, I’m amazed the Dorn project didn’t hit PG, Manybooks.net and other sites before August 2007. Perhaps it’s just because of the usual challenges of coordinating volunteers or a desire to smooth out the number of releases.
Simply curious—and grateful
I’m simply curious. I’m grateful that PG and DP are around, regardless of the delay. You know how much the volunteers got for work on the project, of course: $0. That’s why credit for more volunteers in each book would wonderful, particularly if it helped their personal Web traffic, even in a small way. If nothing else, it might be a way to help volunteers with similar interests catch up with each other—with an asterisk or some other mark used to indicate that the volunteers cared about the book as a book, rather than just as something in need of scanning and proofing. The back of the book could even list hometowns of the volunteers. Great PR peg, by the way. When volunteers accumulated lots of credits, notices could go to hometown newspapers—to inspire feature stories, which in turn could aid PG and DP’s funding potential (legally they’re separate entities now) and also encourage use of pub domain books by local libraries.
No, I’m not suggesting that this be at the top of PG and DP’s priorities, but it’s something to think about, long term. If you can’t pay people in money, why not in glory—especially the off-line variety meaningful to their neighbors in the Real World?
* * *
Meanwhile back to Eric. He also reminds us that Larry Lessig is backing off from copyright-worked work to focus on campaign donation matters. And finally, he updates us on his whereabouts; he’s now living “in exile” in Shanghai (Iraq-protest-related?).
OK, here’s the lowdown in Eric Eldred’s own words. Best of luck to you, Eric!
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Re: http://www.teleread.com/blog/?p=7110 (“Erik Dorn”)
Thanks for the mention, although not necessary.
Good luck with your work on TeleRead; hope readers enjoy the book. As you point out, the movie was terrific.
Actually Lessig is not going to do much more with the public domain; he has turned to other work, fighting corruption, although he still works with Creative Commons. And the copyright extension won’t come up for more legislation for years, after I’m dead. But his case Golan might help with orphan works; keep tuned.
I scanned “Erik Dorn” a few years ago along with a couple hundred others and sent it to DP, I don’t know why it took so long to process and I’m rather surprised to see it emerge.
I have been living in exile in the People’s Republic of China. You can imagine, it is a little different from Virginia, and remote from the little world of public domain online books, so it was fun to read your piece today. Thanks!
=eric
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Comments:
“Even if Eric or another hardworking volunteer was the star by far, might there be a way for PG and/or Distributed Proof Readers to give credit in a book to the top twenty-five people who clocked in the most time? Or maybe the top five?”
That could be problematic, because:
1) Time does not necessarily equal work;
2) Even if we used another metric, it would always be unfair to someone; but most importantly
3) Many volunteers do not want to be credited.
At Disitributed Proofreaders we have thought about these issues many times before, but have so far failed to come up with a solution.
Nevertheless, David, you are welcome to program the necessary code to make giving credit where credit is due easier. Surely you aren’t expecting our already overworked volunteer programmers to do that for you?
Branko: Thanks for your feedback. As noted, I’m not suggesting this be a top priority, but it’s something to consider for the long run since both DP and PG’s code will be evolving and major changes will happen and this could go on the features list. We’re not just talking about direct credit or curiosity value. Identification of the most productive volunteers in City X or Y could be used as a basis for news stories, which, as noted, could lead to more interest in funding PG and DP and in use of their books. Obviously volunteers who didn’t want credit could indicate this in databases. Those who preferred credit could be formally honored, with that being used as news pegs to generate interest in PG. This might even be a way to help students use PG and DP as a community-service-work project, especially in digitizing local content. Right now PG is just an abstraction to most newspaper readers (and radio and TV listeners). My proposal, once the resources existed to implement it, would help give PG/ DP a local face. Thanks. David
What PG and DP need is better press relations, period. Unfortunately that too is not something most volunteers find terrifically important, or it would already have happened.
As for the speed with which books travel through DP; I’ve just had an easy book take two years. We have switched from a system that produces reasonable quality books quickly to one that produces good quality books very, very slowly. I am not sure that is a good thing, but of course anybody can set up a competitor site (and indeed there are a number of proofreading efforts out there already).
Branko: Well, I encourage you to do more PG/DP items for the TeleBlog on the efforts of individual volunteers, which they can then show their local newspapers or you can e-mail to them. I’m all in favor of here-and-now PR efforts, too. My idea would help, but, as I’ve noted from the start, it can wait. Thanks. David
I had some dealings with DP a while back. I suggested that they might get a better response from the public if they gave more attention to books that had been bestsellers in the past rather than to those which had never had an audience of more than a few hundred readers. No response.
I also did some quick sums and estimated that proofreading through the DP interface took two to three times as long as proofreading offline with a suitably tweaked tool like MS-Word. Why? Largely because the same errors tend to occur many times over in a scanned text — ‘tlie’ for ‘the’, for instance — and can be corrected globally in a single command rather than having to go through and fix each one individually. It’s also much quicker and easier to work with a substantial chunk of text on the screen rather than having it dribbled out one page at a time.
Luckily Gutenberg Australia under Col Choat is far quicker to vet and update material than PG USA seems to be, and this is where all my scanned material now goes.
Jon, who did you try to contact?
I also worked on Erik Dorn at DP – both when it went through under the old, streamlined system, and then when it came back again through the new, broken system. A lot of books got caught like that, in mid-processing, suddenly back up for complete checks again.
DP’s new system and the revisions that preceded it finally succeeded in driving me out of DP. It seemed clear to me that the inner cadre of “purists” had taken over, and these were not interested in amateur contributors, they wanted professional (albeit still unpaid) contributors only, who had to pass written tests, constantly update their professional skills by revising the ever-changing markup rules, and pass the written tests over again. Of particular problem was the difficulties they presented contributors in being allowed to work on proofing round 2, or “P2″ as it’s called there.
Then after guaranteeing that almost nobody qualified to proof round 2 pages, DP began posting notices saying they were falling behind because nobody was proofing pages at round 2.
After round 2 of proofing there are, or were last I checked, 3 more rounds to go: 2 formatting rounds, and a final read-through.
No wonder it’s so slow!!!
I wish the Internet Archives’ ReCaptcha code were used by more sites around the ‘net.
As for ‘crediting’ the volunteers, I always liked Ingmar Bergman’s comment that he was like one of the masons on a gothic cathedral, nameless but proud to have taken part in so grand an edifice. (Bergman was however never ‘nameless’ and I wonder how sincere he was in that statement!)
My own feelings are that the DP contributors are repaid by having the PG books to read. Since being ‘disinvited’ by DP, I’ve gone back to reading the PG books in original format and then mailing errata to them, as my preferred way to pay back the community for providing us all with the great works.
There is no requirement for P1, the first proofreading round, but unfortunately there are indeed requirements for most if not all further rounds. There was talk of re-testing everybody now and again every half year or so, but I think The Powers That Be (that’s what the guys and gals pulling the strings are called at DP) forgot about that one.
I think nobody is driving hard at resolving the P2 bottleneck because deep down everybody realizes that there will always be a bottleneck somewhere.
Oops, my bad, I just found out I had lost access to two rounds, because my last test was too old. However, that was only the automated test; I have yet to hear of taking the human-checked test again.