About This Site
Distributed Proofreaders Canada (DPC) was founded in 2007 by Michael Shepard and David Jones to support the digitization of Public Domain books. Our inspiration was DP International, originally conceived to assist Project Gutenberg (PG). Just as Distributed Proofreaders (DP) is now the main source of PG e-books, we expect DPC to become the main source of e-books for Project Gutenberg Canada(PGC) that started on July 1, 2007. All our proofreaders, managers, developers and so on are volunteers. The main principles of our mission are to: (1) preserve Canadiana, one page at a time, (2) take advantage of the favourable copyright laws in Canada to make books published after 1923, written by authors who died at least 50 years ago, more available to the public. If you have any questions or comments regarding this site, please e-mail dphelp@pgdpcanada.net.

Site Concept
This site provides a web-based method of easing the proofreading work associated with the digitization of Public Domain books into Project Gutenberg Canada e-books. By breaking the work into individual pages many proofreaders can be working on the same book at the same time. This significantly speeds up the proofreading/e-book creation process.

When a proofreader elects to proofread a page of a particular book, the text and image file are displayed on a single web page. This allows the page text to be easily reviewed and compared to the image file, thus assisting the proofreading of the page text. The edited text is then submitted back to the site via the same web page that it was edited on. A second proofreader is then presented with the work of the first proofreader and the page image. Once they have verified the work of the first proofreader and corrected any additional errors the page text is again submitted back to the site. The book then progresses through two formatting rounds using the same web interface.

Once all pages for a particular book have been processed, a post-processor joins the pieces, properly formats them into a Project Gutenberg Canada e-book, optionally makes it available to interested parties for 'smooth reading', and submits it to the PGC archive.

How You Can Help
The first step to take to help us out would be to register to be a new proofreader. (A 'Register' link also appears at the top of the screen.) After you register be sure to read over both the email you receive as well as FAQ Central which provides helpful resources on how to proofread. (See also the 'Help' at the top of any screen.) After you have registered & read through some of the intro documents, choose an interesting-looking book from our Current Projects and try proofreading a page or two.

You don't even have to register to have a look at the Smooth Reading Pool Preview, though you do to upload corrections. Follow the link for more information.

Remember that there is no commitment expected on this site. Proofread as often or as seldom as you like, and as many or as few pages as you like. We encourage people to do 'a page a day', but it's entirely up to you! We hope you will join us in our mission of 'preserving the literary history of the world in a freely available form for everyone to use'.