PROOFREADING

The first eBooks were created by typing the text of printed books into

word processor or text editing programs, and then submitting the files

for final formatting and redistribution. Typists would perform basic

formatting, including:

Omitting page headers/footers and pagination;

Spelling correction (spelling modernization was optional,

and some transcribers preferred to leave the original

spelling);

De-hyphenation;

Relocating any footnotes to endnotes;

Adding basic markup or emphasis, as described above;

Standard formatting for headings and chapters. Chapter

titles would have two blank lines before, and one blank line

after;

Line and paragraph formatting, including line endings with

carriage returns + line feed at approximately 72 characters,

no paragraph indentation (unless it is a block quote or

similar), and a blank line between paragraphs.

Plain text eBooks, which were the only major format until HTML became

more frequent by the mid- to late-1990s, were designed to be viewed on

computer monitors with fixed-width fonts with 80-character lines. Plain

text is still provided for nearly all Project Gutenberg eBooks today,

although HTML and other formats are also provided.

Once an item is typed into an electronic file, and basic formatting

is completed, one or more rounds of proofreading will help to improve

quality. This includes typos, poor formatting, or inconsistency of

presentation. In practice, all eBooks published by Project Gutenberg

still have errors, even if they are far better than 99% accurate. For

example, an eBook that is 99.999% accurate (i.e., “five nines”) will

still have one wrong character in 10,000. That amounts to approximately

30 errors in a typical 50,000 word novel. Proofreading is, by

its nature, asymptotic. Subsequent rounds of proofreading improve an

eBook, but that eBook is still likely to contain some errors.

Errors in eBooks often reflect errors in their printed sources, and

Project Gutenberg encourages fixing those errors.

Forty-Five Years of Digitizing Ebooks: Project Gutenberg's Practices · 第 12 / 30 题