But there are many writers out there who aren’t in a position to hire a professional proofreader and, as you pointed out, many of us really need a bit of help! The idea behind Book Oven is to create a community of writers that is willing t0 help each other catch the obvious errors. If members of that community then go on to be picked up by a traditional publishing house, then their usual proofreading processes will still apply – Book Oven won’t affect that.

There are many more books being written than will ever be in Book Oven, and I doubt the site will have any impact on professional proofreaders at all.

We have discussed whether it would be possible to serve up a known error every so often, but for the moment we’re focusing on ironing out the bugs! That doesn’t mean we won’t figure out a way to do it in the future though.

But also I think that when we have more people in the normal Bite-Size editor, adding in their own texts, there will probably be more errors for us to find. The Gutenberg texts have all been read and re-read so the percentage of errors is much lower than, say, the first draft of my novel!

We’ve had a mixed response to the idea of a mobile interface for the Bite-Size Edits, depending on what sort of phone people have, but we’ll certainly take a look at how easy it will be to experiment with, say, an iPhone client.

Do feel free to keep poking at it and giving us more feedback!

It’s pretty addictive, but I started wondering whether there’s a bit of a divergence between the aims of the input, and the proofreaders. The aim of the input is to be as accurate and have as few mistakes as possible – but the proofreader is motivated to find as many as possible. When you’re working through the snippets, you’re geared up to find errors, so every time you report a correct one, subconsciously you’re being frustrated every time. I was slightly disappointed that I didn’t find any errors!

What about randomly throwing in a *bogus* error every so (not very) often? It would give the proofreader a “reward” when they find it, and also give you a rough way of judging an individual reader’s accuracy.

The other thing this is crying out for is a mobile interface – I could absolutely see myself whiling away an idle moment stood in a queue by proofreading a snippet or two on my iPhone. It’s about as addictive as Drop7, and far more worthwhile

I took 35nZhNYR.

Cheers,

Thanks!

Now I’ll be able to read Project Gutenberg books again! I’m definitely in the Carl class

Everyone else, enjoy!!