That's actually how I know about her -- the double with Alpha Centuari or Die. I haven't read Legend of Lost Earth yet, but I'll get to it eventually.

(Those doubles were her only two SF novels; apparently most everything else she wrote were children's books or pulp-era romances, under the name Hope Campbell. Your SF trivia for today.)

alacy wrote:

I like it too. But I'm not sure if S&Co would need to re-implement the site code: the code is open source (and in fact right over here:)
sourceforge.net/projects/dproofreaders/

Distributed Proofreaders has an elaborate work flow, involving good word/bad word lists, flow-specific mark-ups for capturing things like block quotes, poetry indentations, etc. S&Co probably doesn't need all of that, but I do think they could use several iterations of people reading unformatted text and comparing it to the page images. I'm half way through "A Plunge into Space", and have flagged a good number of potential OCR errors. I would love helping proofread and reduce these, pre-release.

Some of these errors are of the type DP calls "stealth scannos". These are errors that an OCR engine is likely to make, but that pass spell checkers. Such as he/be, or he/lie. Also, I've found some inconsistency in hyphenation (for-wards or forwards?) DP has great amounts of experience finding these kinds of errors (20,000 titles and counting). I think the S&Co. people would do well to talk with them and discover what processes they can borrow.

Did you check the corrected v2.0 Files? I squashed lots of errors in those. If you find more, please tell me.

Prester Dave wrote:
Well they would have to implement it, but they wouldn't have to pay someone to develop it. If they are going to continue the conversion of DT Books (Dead Tree) to e-books. It looks like even if they didn't open proofing to everyone that Distributed Proofreaders would speed things up and reduce OCR errors making it in to the released versions.

RedDwarf wrote:
I have the V2.0 of Plunge, but only V1.0 of Torch is on-site. Unless I'm looking at the wrong place? (http://savethescifi.com/index.php/books/rescued-books)

How do you suggest I send my mark-up? I have a change from/to list, in ODT format, which I'd be happy to put in the forum, or mail, or ....

(I tried to stay on the safe side, meaning that a number of items might not be transcription errors, but just seem ... wrong.)

alacy wrote:
Makes sense: the OCR program may be incorrectly recognizing hyphens as ¬, and then failing to remove them during de-hyphenation, since they are not hyphens (they are the logical "NOT" symbol). I know the ABBYY Finereader program lets the user restrict the character set it will recognize, which avoids this problem. (By the way, I've also seen what may be some non-breaking spaces. I changed the CSS to left align the paragraphs, and noticed an inexplicably short line. I think these can be avoided the same way.)

I'm finding the lead character extremely unlikable. No chance that's an OCR error, is there?

Spoiler:

What didn't you like about him? Was it the way he flipped from the greatest hero the Tower People have ever seen, to the greatest hero the Torch People have ever seen, largely because Mary was attractive?

Overall, I thought the book was entertaining, although I would have liked it more if they spent more time with the two side in conflict. (The Siege took only 4% of the book.) (And, I couldn't help wonder, what were the Wild Folk doing while everyone was busy battling at the Great Hall?)

Personally I didn't like fortune becayse he was an opportunistic asshole, who wasn't even half as smart as he wanted to belief. In the end he helped the Torch people just because he had a raging boner, not because he was thinking about the good of the people.

Prester Dave wrote:


No, I was only referring to the Plunge.

Wired has a scoop for us:



Full article about the shop and the project here. Really, there should probably be a thread for collecting press about the project.

On the book itself, there's a modern review here and Google Books actually has a contemporary review available here. It sounds like there will be some similarities to our first saved novel. A scientist successfully negates earth's gravity, and uses this to make a trip to Mars where he meets Martians living in a Utopian socialism. I suppose it will be interesting to compare and contrast with Plunge.

The S&Co Facebook presence says it may be available this weekend....

I ran across both items as well. I wish they would post here at least as soon as they post on facebook and especially before the information is posted to a news website.

Little over 5 hours and the weekend will be over without the newly rescued book showing up. I assume Singularity is still caught in the "everything takes longer and cost more than you plan". Hopefully when they get a few more done their estimates will get better.

Of course, they did prudently write "may be available"....

Do you plan on "smooth reading" the new book? I'd be happy to compare notes.