The Proofreading Quizzes

FallenArchangel knows! Try it.

Hot off the Press

I am one of the thousands of volunteers at Distributed Proofreaders. We’re Distributed because we’re located in different places all over the globe and we’re Proofreaders because we read text looking for errors. We turn out-of-copyright printed books into electronic eBooks, which have selectable/searchable text and which are also suitable for text-to-speech software, and then make those eBooks available to all, for free, via Project Gutenberg.

Once we have a scanned image of a page from a printed book, we run Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software on it to turn the image of text into actual editable text. The OCR accuracy is good, but tends to still leave many mistakes (what we call “scannos”) in the created text. We then, in multiple passes, verify the OCR’s results.

In striving towards a high quality for the finished eBooks we aim for a consistent result from all the many different…

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Three Complete H. P. Lovecraft Poetry Readings by William E. Hart

Marvelous CD, a must for fans of H. P. Lovecraft and lovers of weird/horror poetry.

CthulhuWho1's Blog

The folks over at Fedogan & Bremer, and Composer Graham Plowman, have all approved my request to share the following three complete tracks from our “H. P. Lovecraft’s Fungi From Yuggoth and Other Poems” CD (published by Fedogan & Bremer (2016)), in a visual form on YouTube, so everyone can hear (and read) some full-length examples of what’s on the 48-track CD.

Just click on the title cards below, or the links below them, and you will get to hear some of my personal favorites; including “Nemesis,” which I believe will still be a favorite poem and reading for Lovecraftians, long after I am gone from this world.

All three of these poems, are given a power and majesty by Graham Plowman’s beautiful scores; as are all of the other 45 tracks on the CD too!

The Ancient Track by H. P. Lovecraft
Read by William…

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Our 18th Anniversary

Congratulations and many thanks to all for the many books so lovingly provided.

Hot off the Press

Eighteen years ago, on October 1, 2000, Distributed Proofreaders volunteers began “preserving history one page at a time” by preparing public-domain e-books for Project Gutenberg. Since then, DP has contributed over 36,000 unique titles. Here’s a look back at some of DP’s accomplishments since our last retrospective.

Milestones

33,000 titles. In November 2016, Distributed Proofreaders posted its 33,000th unique title to Project Gutenberg, A Flower Wedding, by the great children’s book illustrator Walter Crane. You can read all about it in this celebratory post.

34,000 titles. Our 34,000th title was, appropriately, A Manual of the Art of Bookbinding, and was posted in July 2017. The DP blog post on this milestone is here.

35,000 titles. DP contributed its 35,000th title, Shores of the Polar Sea, in January 2018. This beautifully illustrated account of a 19th-Century expedition to the North Pole is celebrated in this…

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The Kid from Cleveland

Thanks, Jim! I’m not a fan of short stories in general, but Harlan Ellison wrote some great ones – very memorable.

tarnmoor

Of Course, It Helps If You Have Harlan’s Imagination

No, not me, but a much more talented writer. Harlan Ellison (1934-2018) was born in Cleveland and raised there and in nearby Painesville, Ohio. It is a pity that Ellison is almost as well known for his legendary abrasiveness as for his speculative fiction, which ranks with the best ever written. As he himself wrote in Danse Macabre:

My work is foursquare for chaos. I spend my life personally, and my work professionally, keeping the soup boiling. Gadfly is what they call you when you are no longer dangerous; I much prefer troublemaker, malcontent, desperado. I see myself as a combination of Zorro and Jiminy Cricket.. My stories go out from here and raise hell. From time to time some denigrater or critic with umbrage will say of my work, ‘He only wrote that to shock.’ I smile and nod…

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10 Great Quotes from Writers about Fools

Don’t be an April Fool. Read and learn.

Interesting Literature

Funny and witty sourced quotes from writers – about fools, folly, and foolishness

Here cometh April again, and as far as I can see the world hath more fools in it than ever. – Charles Lamb, cited in Wordsworth Book of Humorous Quotations

A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools. – Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

My nose itch’d, and I knew I should drink wine, or kiss a fool. – Jonathan Swift, ‘Polite Conversation’

In university they don’t tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools. – Doris Lessing, Martha Quest

If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing. – Anatole France, cited in Listening and Speaking: A Guide to Effective Oral Communication

Surprises are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable. –

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