Wikipedia

Distributed Proofreaders

Distributed Proofreaders (commonly abbreviated as DP or PGDP) is a web-based project that supports the development of e-texts for Project Gutenberg by allowing many people to work together in proofreading drafts of e-texts for errors. As of December 2025, the site had digitized 50,000 titles.[2]

Distributed Proofreaders
"Distributed Proofreaders" set in blue serif text, with the second word beginning at the bottom right of the first one. Below the second word, "Preserving History One Page at a Time." in black serif text.
Screenshot of the proofreading interface on Distributed Proofreaders.
Screenshot of the proofreading interface on Distributed Proofreaders.
Type of site
Not-for-profit
Available in3 languages
List of languages
English, French, German
Country of originUnited States of America
OwnerDistributed Proofreaders Foundation (DPF)
FounderCharles Franks
General managerLinda Hamilton
URLwww.pgdp.net
CommercialNo
RegistrationOptional
Launched2000; 25 years ago (2000)
Current statusActive
Content license
Public Domain
Written inPHP[1]
OCLC number1087497129

History

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Distributed Proofreaders was founded by Charles Franks in 2000 as an independent site to assist Project Gutenberg.[3][4] Distributed Proofreaders became an official Project Gutenberg site in 2002.[4]

On 8 November 2002, Distributed Proofreaders was slashdotted,[5][6] and more than 4,000 new members joined in one day, causing an influx of new proofreaders and software developers, which helped to increase the quantity and quality of e-text production.

In 2006, the Distributed Proofreaders Foundation was formed to provide Distributed Proofreaders with its own legal entity and not-for-profit status, separate from Project Gutenberg.[7][8] The founding trustees were Charles Franks, Juliet Sutherland, and Gregory B. Newby.[7]

In July 2015, the 30,000th Distributed Proofreaders produced e-text was posted to Project Gutenberg. DP-contributed e-texts comprised more than half of works in Project Gutenberg by 2009.[4]

Proofreading process

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DP servers are located in the United States, and therefore works must be cleared by Project Gutenberg as being in the public domain according to United States copyright law before they can be proofread and eventually published.[9]

Public domain works, typically books with expired copyright, are scanned by volunteers or sourced from digitization projects, and the images are run through optical character recognition (OCR) software.[9] Since OCR software is far from perfect, the resulting text always includes errors.[10] To correct them, pages are made available to volunteers via the Internet; the original page image and the recognized text appear side by side.[11] Each set is presented to multiple volunteers to enter corrections, which results in a combined dataset that minimizes errors.[12] This process distributes the time-consuming error-correction process with a method akin to distributed computing.[3]

A post-processor combines the pages and prepares the text for uploading to Project Gutenberg.[9]

Besides custom software created to support the project, DP also runs a forum and a wiki for project coordinators and participants.

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DP Europe

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In January 2004, Distributed Proofreaders Europe started, hosted by Project Rastko, Serbia.[13] This site had the ability to process text in Unicode UTF-8 encoding. Books proofread centered on European culture, with a considerable proportion of non-English texts including Hebrew, Arabic, Urdu, and many others. As of October 2013, DP Europe had produced 787 e-texts, the last of these in November 2011.

DP Canada

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In December 2007, Distributed Proofreaders Canada launched to support the production of e-books for Project Gutenberg Canada and take advantage of shorter Canadian copyright terms. Although it was established by members of the original Distributed Proofreaders site, it is a separate entity.[14] All its projects are posted to Faded Page, their book archive website. In addition, it supplies books to Project Gutenberg Canada, and, where copyright laws are compatible, to the original Project Gutenberg.

Milestones

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The source for many of these entries is the DP Timeline.[15]

Milestone Date e-text
First 1 Oct 2000 The Odyssey, Homer, Lang tr. (first pages for proofreading)
1,000th 19 Feb 2003 Tales of St. Austin's, P. G. Wodehouse
2,000th 3 Sep 2003 Hamlet — the 'Bad Quarto', William Shakespeare
3,000th 14 Jan 2004 The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton
4,000th 6 Apr 2004 Aventures du Capitaine Hatteras, Jules Verne
5,000th 24 Aug 2004 A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature, John William Cousin
10,000th 9 Mar 2007 (See 10,000th E-book below)
15,000th 12 May 2009 Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666, Various. Henry Oldenburg (editor)
20,000th 10 April 2011 (See 20,000th E-book below)
25,000th 10 April 2013 The Art and Practice of Silver Printing, H. P. Robinson and Capt. Abney[16]
30,000th 7 July 2015 Graded Literature Readers: Fourth Book[17]
35,000th 26 Jan 2018 Shores of the Polar Sea, a Narrative of the Arctic Expedition of 1875–1876[18]
40,000th 10 October 2020 All four volumes of London Labour and the London Poor[19]
45,000th 18 January 2023 Elihu Stewart's Down the Mackenzie and Up the Yukon in 1906[20]
50,000th 7 December 2025 A Dictionary of the Art of Printing[2]

10,000th E-book

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On 9 March 2007, Distributed Proofreaders announced the completion of more than 10,000 titles. In celebration, a collection of fifteen titles was published:

20,000th E-book

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On April 10, 2011, the 20,000th book milestone was celebrated as a group release of bilingual books:[21]

  • The Renaissance in Italy–Italian Literature, Vol 1, John Addington Symonds (English with Italian)
  • Märchen und Erzählungen für Anfänger; erster Teil, H. A. Guerber (German with English)
  • Gedichte und Sprüche, Walther von der Vogelweide (Middle High German (c. 1050–1500) with German)
  • Studien und Plaudereien im Vaterland, Sigmon Martin Stern (German with English)
  • Caos del Triperuno, Teofilo Folengo (Italian with Latin)
  • Niederländische Volkslieder, Hoffmann von Fallersleben (German with Dutch)
  • A "San Francisco", Salvatore Di Giacomo (Italian with Neapolitan)
  • O' voto, Salvatore Di Giacomo (Italian with Neapolitan)
  • De Latino sine Flexione & Principio de Permanentia, Giuseppe Peano (1858–1932) (Latin with Latino sine Flexione)
  • Cappiddazzu paga tuttu—Nino Martoglio, Luigi Pirandello (Italian with Sicilian)
  • The International Auxiliary Language Esperanto, George Cox (English with Esperanto)
  • Lusitania: canti popolari portoghesi, Ettore Toci (Italian with French)

30,000th E-book

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On 7 July 2015, the 30,000th book milestone was celebrated with a group of thirty texts. One was numbered 30,000:[22]

  • Graded literature readers - Fourth book, editors: Harry Pratt Judson and Ida C. Bender, 1900

40,000th E-book

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On 10 October 2020, the 40,000th book milestone was celebrated with the completion of a four-volume work, London Labour and the London Poor, by Henry Mayhew.[23]

50,000th E-book

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On 7 December 2025, the 50,000th book milestone was celebrated with the posting of "A Dictionary of the Art of Printing" by William Savage.[2]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ "Distributed Proofreaders". github.com. Retrieved 2022-02-01.
  2. ^ a b c jandac (2025-12-07). "Celebrating 50,000 Titles | Hot off the Press". Hot off the Press: Book Reviews and Notes from Distributed Proofreaders. Distributed Proofreaders. Retrieved 2025-12-07.
  3. ^ a b Lessig, Lawrence (2009). Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. Penguin. p. 167. ISBN 978-0-14-311613-4.
  4. ^ a b c "Project Gutenberg". Encyclopedia Britannica. 11 August 2025. Retrieved 20 October 2025.
  5. ^ "Gutenberg:Volunteers' Voices". Project Gutenberg. Archived from the original on 2008-09-18. Retrieved 2008-07-12.
  6. ^ "Distributed Proofreading's slashdotting". Boing Boing. 12 November 2002. Archived from the original on 2007-11-09. Retrieved 2008-07-12.
  7. ^ a b "Distributed Proofreaders Foundation History". DPWiki. 2025-06-18. Retrieved 2025-10-20.
  8. ^ John, Last (October 31, 2025). "Obituary: Project Gutenberg CEO Greg Newby helped put a trove of literature online". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved November 4, 2025.
  9. ^ a b c Newby, G. B.; Franks, C. (2003). "Distributed proofreading". 2003 Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, 2003. Proceedings. IEEE Comput. Soc: 361–363. doi:10.1109/JCDL.2003.1204888. ISBN 978-0-7695-1939-5.
  10. ^ Piotrowski, Michael (2022-05-31). Natural Language Processing for Historical Texts. Springer Nature. p. 43. ISBN 978-3-031-02146-6.
  11. ^ Gentry, Craig; Ramzan, Zulfikar; Stuart Stubblebine (February 28 – March 3, 2005). "Secure Distributed Human Computation". In Andrew S. Patrick; Moti Yung (eds.). Financial cryptography and data security: 9th International Conference. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 3570. Roseau, The Commonwealth of Dominica: Springer. p. 329. doi:10.1145/1064009.1064026. ISBN 3-540-26656-9.
  12. ^ Christianson, Bruce; Crispo, Bruno; Malcolm, James A.; Roe, Michael (2009-10-15). Security Protocols: 14th International Workshop, Cambridge, UK, March 27-29, 2006, Revised Selected Papers. Springer Science & Business Media. p. 178. ISBN 978-3-642-04903-3.
  13. ^ Lebert, Marie (November 4, 2010). "Distributed Proofreaders, producteur des livres du Projet Gutenberg, a 10 ans". Actualitté (in French). Archived from the original on October 5, 2011. Retrieved 2011-06-30.
  14. ^ Lebert, Marie (November 5, 2010). "Distributed Proofreaders just celebrated its 10th anniversary". Teleread. Retrieved 12 November 2025.
  15. ^ "DP Timeline". DPWiki. Retrieved 2020-08-13.
  16. ^ "A Silver Anniversary—25,000 Titles posted to Project Gutenberg!". Pgdp.net. 10 April 2013. Retrieved 20 October 2025.
  17. ^ "Celebrating 30,000 Titles". Pgdp.net. 7 July 2015. Retrieved 20 October 2025.
  18. ^ "Celebrating 35,000 Titles". Pgdp.net. 26 January 2018. Retrieved 20 October 2025.
  19. ^ "Celebrating 40,000 Titles". Pgdp.net. 10 October 2020.
  20. ^ "Celebrating 45,000 Titles". Pgdp.net. 18 January 2023.
  21. ^ Distributed Proofreaders celebrates 20,000 books posted Archived 2011-06-19 at the Wayback Machine, Distributed Proofreaders, April 10, 2011
  22. ^ "Distributed Proofreaders • View topic - 30,000 Unique Titles Preserved!". Pgdp.net. Retrieved 2016-09-15.
  23. ^ "Celebrating 40,000 Titles". Pgdp.net. Retrieved 2025-09-01.
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