I live in the northeast suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, with my wife, three kids, and a small fluffy dog. I’ve been fortunate enough to work from home since before it was cool (1999), so I can spend time here instead of in rush hour twice a day.
I’m an engineering manager for a tier-1 Internet backbone. I lead a team of software engineers creating tools to manage, automate, monitor, and analyze our network. By the way, nothing I say on this site represents my employer; any opinions are my own.
In my spare time, I volunteer for Distributed Proofreaders, an affiliate of Project Gutenberg. We create high-quality ebooks from books that have entered the public domain.
The idea behind Distributed Proofreaders is simple. Volunteers proofread (and then format) scans of books, one page at a time. Every page goes through multiple rounds so different people see each one. At the end, one final person (the post-processor) takes that carefully proofed text and assembles it into an ebook to be published by Project Gutenberg.
Over the past 20+ years, I’ve proofed pages from many different books. In more recent years, I’ve started to work in post-processing as well. It can be tedious work, but it’s satisfying to me. Below are some of the books I’ve helped to publish as a post-processor. I may have been (almost‡) the “last hands” to bring an ebook to its final form, but for each of these books, between dozens to hundreds of other volunteers spent countless hours carefully cleaning up the text before the material got to me.
Do you have 15 minutes a day to spare? Come on over to DP and check it out–even if you only have the time to proofread or format “one page a day”, your help would be greatly appreciated! If proofreading doesn’t sound like fun, stop by the Smooth Reading section, we’re always looking for help reading not-yet-published ebooks and we welcome any feedback from you as a reader as well!
‡ Project Gutenberg’s “Whitewashers” make the final changes before posting