Touched up a public domain book

Rockin · 01-26-2015, 10:01 PM

I recently grabbed the public domain book on the Civil War called The Passing of the Armies by Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain from kobo.com. Since the epub was created by OCR on a scan of the original book, it looked pretty bad. I then used Sigil and along with the scanned pdf kobo also had, I touched up spelling and other mistakes. It is my first touchup and I am fairly happy with it. There were many footnotes and I just put them in right after the paragraph they were needed so that looks sort of funny but WTH.

After I finished, I regretted not writing down all the common OCR errors. It would be a good place to start my next one. One thing I liked about Sigil was I could create a spelling list specifically for that book so I could keep the list separate from other books I may work on. Spelling a hundred years ago doesn't match today's spelling in some cases.

I am wondering if people generally do more work than this before uploading them to Mobileread. Or do you post it and get feedback for another round?

Jellby · 01-27-2015, 06:52 AM

Some people do just that (usually we don't change the spelling, just make it consistent within the book). Some people proofread more deeply, carefully comparing with some reference printed version. Some people just take the the Project Gutenberg text, feed it to calibre/Sigil and publish the result (don't do this, this is actually against our the guidelines).

Whatever you do is fine, just specify in your book, or in the upload thread, what you have done.

01-26-2015, 10:01 PM	#1
Rockin Enthusiast Posts: 35 Karma: 4244 Join Date: Aug 2011 Location: USA Device: Kobo Aura HD, Kobo Touch	Touched up a public domain book I recently grabbed the public domain book on the Civil War called The Passing of the Armies by Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain from kobo.com. Since the epub was created by OCR on a scan of the original book, it looked pretty bad. I then used Sigil and along with the scanned pdf kobo also had, I touched up spelling and other mistakes. It is my first touchup and I am fairly happy with it. There were many footnotes and I just put them in right after the paragraph they were needed so that looks sort of funny but WTH. After I finished, I regretted not writing down all the common OCR errors. It would be a good place to start my next one. One thing I liked about Sigil was I could create a spelling list specifically for that book so I could keep the list separate from other books I may work on. Spelling a hundred years ago doesn't match today's spelling in some cases. I am wondering if people generally do more work than this before uploading them to Mobileread. Or do you post it and get feedback for another round?

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01-27-2015, 06:52 AM	#2
Jellby frumious Bandersnatch Posts: 7,536 Karma: 19000001 Join Date: Jan 2008 Location: Spaniard in Sweden Device: Cybook Orizon, Kobo Aura	Some people do just that (usually we don't change the spelling, just make it consistent within the book). Some people proofread more deeply, carefully comparing with some reference printed version. Some people just take the the Project Gutenberg text, feed it to calibre/Sigil and publish the result (don't do this, this is actually against our the guidelines). Whatever you do is fine, just specify in your book, or in the upload thread, what you have done.

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