Hot off the Press

Just half a year after our 10th anniversary, we have reason to celebrate another big milestone. As of today, Distributed Proofreaders has contributed 20,000 unique titles to the bookshelves of Project Gutenberg, free to enjoy for everybody.

Out of curiosity, I had a look at the numbers. It took us more than six years to post the first 10,000 books, reaching that milestone in March 2007.  We have doubled that number in just a bit over four years. That’s on average about 2500 projects posted per year!

In addition to being the biggest single producer of ebooks for Project Gutenberg, Distributed Proofreaders is a truly international community. People from all over the world contribute, bringing with them their unique skills and preferences. One area where this becomes obvious is the variety of different languages we’re working in. While most projects only contain a single language, there are those where two or even more languages are used. These books are often especially challenging, needing people with skills in different languages to complete. At Distributed Proofreaders, help with a language you’re not familiar with is never far away. Native speakers of lots of different languages as well as specialists in a few that aren’t even spoken anymore are always happy to answer questions about tricky issues, making it therefore possible to complete those challenging projects and post the resulting books to Project Gutenberg for everybody to enjoy.

To celebrate that diversity, we have chosen to showcase books containing at least two languages. Here’s a list of our projects for the 20,000 celebration for you to enjoy:

• The Renaissance in Italy–Italian Literature, Vol 1—John Addington Symonds (English with Italian)
• Märchen und Erzählungen für Anfänger; erster Teil—H. A. Guerber (German with English)
• Gedichte und Sprüche—Walther von der Vogelweide (German, Middle High (ca. 1050-1500) with German)
• Studien und Plaudereien im Vaterland—Sigmon Martin Stern (German with English)
• Caos del Triperuno—Teofilo Folengo (Italian with Latin)
• Niederländische Volkslieder—Hoffmann von Fallersleben (German with Dutch)
• A “San Francisco”—Salvatore Di Giacomo (Italian with Neapolitan)
• O’ voto—Salvatore Di Giacomo (Italian with Neapolitan)
• “De Latino sine Flexione” & “Principio de Permanentia”—Giuseppe Peano (1858-1932) (Latin with Latino sine Flexione)
• Cappiddazzu paga tuttu—Nino Martoglio – Luigi Pirandello (Italian with Sicilian)
• The International Auxiliary Language Esperanto —George Cox (English with Esperanto)
• Lusitania: canti popolari portoghesi—Ettore Toci (Italian with French)

A big Thank You goes to everybody who has contributed to these and all the other books that make up this huge number, in whatever capacity.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 9th, 2011 at 11:07 pm and is filed under Special Day. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.