Nice to wake up to a story about digital libraries and have a good part of it about reuse and remix of ibiblio-hosted materials. In today’s New York Times Arts Section is:

Sampling, if Not Digesting, the Digital Library
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: April 9, 2007

[…]

Admittedly, it is not that difficult to find all this free on the Internet. As the credits in Mr. Seltzer’s books affirm, almost all come from the Web’s premier text site, Project Gutenberg (ibiblio.org/gutenberg), a project that started in 1971 and trumps Mr. Seltzer’s “complete” collection with its 20,000 free books, including selections in Chinese, Dutch, Afrikaans, Czech, Sanskrit and Yiddish.

Many of the Gutenberg books (including those used by Mr. Seltzer) are also prepared by Distributed Proofreaders (pgdp.net/c/), which does for proofreading what Wikipedia does for encyclopedias. Public domain books are proofread by volunteers who are given a page of a scanned book to compare with the electronic text. In 2004, the site says, 300 to 400 proofreaders from around the world participated each day, completing 4,000 to 7,000 pages of text a day, which are then proofread again in a second round before being submitted to Project Gutenberg. Yet another site that contributes to Gutenberg, LibriVox.org, uses volunteers to read public domain books, aloud, creating free audio books.

[…]