We buy books. A lot of them. And they’re taking over our lives.
What Bookp(h)ile isn’t
It’s not a library catalogue, nor a reference site. I get nearly all the information about the book from online sources, which may not always be accurate.
It’s not a sales venue. These books aren’t for sale here. Neither do I have any idea what yours is worth.
(And no, I have not read everything I list here.)
What Bookp(h)ile is
Bookp(h)ile is a place for me to keep track of the books I get to supply Distributed Proofreaders (DP), a leading provider of content to Project Gutenberg (PG), an archive of (mostly) copyright-free electronic texts.
DP’s process for producing etexts consists of comparing page scans to the output from an OCR program — over the internet, one page at a time. (It’s a great way to volunteer to a useful project without spending an awful lot of time. All you need to participate is a computer and a willingness to be a little bit nit-picky.) DP gets its texts from people like me — we find books that are not in the PG archive, scan them, OCR them, and make them available at DP.
I hope to use this blog(?) to help me keep track of what I have (over 600 clearances at last count, and 176 projects posted to PG — a babe in the woods compared to several people) and where it is in the process.
I’m also using it sort of as a inventory of what we’ve got stashed in various storage boxes and bins. We just don’t have the room to shelve everything (yet!). I haven’t found the magic free-or-low-cost library software that will read the title page of the book (if there is one) and catalog it for me, so I’m depending on worldcat.org lists to help me remember what we’ve got.