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:

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:

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.

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