Volunteers’ FAQ

Project Gutenberg welcomes contributions of eBooks from people with the interest, time, and skillset needed to meet our submission standards. Details of the process and the standards are at our copyright clearance site copy.pglaf.org and upload site upload.pglaf.org.

Join Distributed Proofreaders, Instead

For most people interested in producing eBooks, we recommend starting with Distributed Proofreaders. With Distributed Proofreaders, you can get involved with different portions of the production pipeline described below. This is a much easier way to get started, and results in very high quality eBooks.

If you simply want to suggest a book for digitization, DP has online forums for this, or you can simply send an email (contact information is on the site).

Distributed Proofreaders maintains canonical guidance on production. See especially:

• The Post-Processing FAQ
• Easy Epub. This is a guide to how best to handle the HTML that goes through epubmaker to lead to passable epubs/mobis files.
• HTML Best Practices. Examples and explanations of recommended HTML coding practices.

Being a Solo Producer

If you might be interested in producing an eBook yourself, without involving Distributed Proofreaders, here is some guidance. But start with what’s above, including the DP links.

In a nutshell, the production process typically involves the following:

• Identify a candidate printed book. Confirm it is not already in the collection, or in process by other volunteers. Use the Collection Development Policy to guide you on eligibility.
• Obtain scans of the book. This may be done using your own scanner, or there might be online scans available. Scans must come from the exact same print edition as your copyright clearance.
• Obtain a copyright clearance for the printed book. Usually this is based on scanned title page and verso page demonstrating the printed book was published more than 95 years ago. See the Copyright How-To.
• Perform optical character recognition (OCR) on the scans, to make an approximate representation of the book in plain text. Depending on the quality and availability of OCR, you may choose to “type in” all or part of a text.
• Proofread, proofread, proofread: “Fix” the OCR output by carefully fixing any errors it made. Remove page headers and footers. De-hyphenate. Add back italics or other formatting.
• Format: Most people start with HTML, and then derive a plain text version from the HTML. It is stronly recommended you utilize a HTML editor or write HTML “by hand” (using a text editor). Most word processors do not create usable HTML, which could lead to significant additional work to meet Project Gutenberg’s HTML requirements. The plain text version may also require some effort to ensure formatting is of high quality, likely starting with “Save as…” from .htm to .txt followed by editing of the .txt with a text editor.
• Check, and recheck. The upload site has various tools, including to test proper conversion to derived formats.
• Upload your work using the copyright clearance key obtained earlier. The “Preview Submission” capability during upload runs several tests; review those results before choosing “Submit eBook.”
• A Project Gutenberg production volunteer (known as a “whitewasher,” after the Mark Twain book) will check your upload prior to posting. Uploads with major problems (invalid HTML/CSS, non-working or incorrect links, etc.) will not be published and must first be corrected by the submitter.
• Once the eBook is added to the Project Gutenberg collection, confirm it is appearing correctly, and all metadata are correct. Note that automatic cataloging (i.e., adding metadata) happens when a new eBook is published, and then is finalized by a human cataloger a few days later.
• If possible, stay in touch into the future. If we receive errata reports that require access to source material, or are stylistic or subjective in nature, we might get in touch to discuss potential changes.

The importance of using the online tools at the upload site cannot be overstated. Use these tools on early versions of your new eBook – even before you are done with more than a few pages. It is much easier to meet the requirements for accuracy, validity and quality from the beginning of your work, than to need to spend hours and days fixing it later.

Each eBook is different. Generally, though, the time spent in formatting and proofreading far exceeds the time spent in scanning+OCR or typing.

If you have questions, get in touch! The contact information page can put you in touch with the helpdesk.

Thank you for your help and interest in creating new Project Gutenberg eBooks!