"The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" ready at Project Gutenberg

The 65th Esperanto book at Project Gutenberg, La Mirinda Sorĉisto de Oz, is now available at Project Gutenberg.

Thanks to Bruce Crisp and James Gilmore for their help with this, but most of all thanks to Donald Broadribb for make a great translation of this popular work and placing it in the public domain.

Mr. Broadribb has furthermore donated 13 other Oz books, as well as translation of two Dr. Doolittle books. I think all of these deserve to be preserved for eternity and made freely available at Project Gutenberg, the premier electronic library of freely reusable works.

To process a book of this nature for Project Gutenberg takes about 10-20 hours of labor. I did most of this work myself for this book (although James Gilmore procured Mr. Broadribb's permission, and Bruce Crisp proofread the work), and I am very familiar with the process and can guide someone through doing it. I would really like someone to volunteer to work closely with me to do the next books. If we do all of these, we will not only increase the count of Esperanto books at Project Gutenberg to 80, but greatly increase the available body of literature for children, young adults, and beginners. I enjoyed reading this in Esperanto, and would recommend it to anyone looking to practice their Esperanto on something a bit easier than "La Infana Raso."

Please send me email at "read.robert" at gmail if you are willing to assist in processing one of these remaining 15 books.

P.S. -- A kind volunteer asked what it took to process one of these books. Here is my reply to her (although she decided that it was too complex for her.)

1) Pick a book (I'd prefer one of the Dr. Doolittle ones, but whatever interests you the most is best.)
2) Try to find an electronic copy on the web.
3) Convert this copy (probably a PDF) into text. I assume this will not require OCR software. If it does, let's pick another book. I've OCRed books in the past. It would be a last resort.
3.5) Remove the illustrations.
4) Make sure the text is in good utf-8 encoded unicode.
5) Proofread the work.
6) Using the utf-8 as a source, convert it to ascii (I use emacs for this, by replacing all of the weird chacters with x-ismo.) This becomes the plain-text ascii version.
7) Using the utf-8 as a source, produce an HTML version, treating the existing versions (and the English PG version if available) as examples. This just means putting in paragraph breaks, adding chapters with the correct style, using for poetry etc. In general you want to make it look nice and be consistent with other PG books. (For textbooks, this is very hard; for fiction, it might take a couple of hours or less per book.)
8) Validate the HTML with the w3c validator.
9) Run "tidy" on the HTML to make sure it follows standards.
10) Download the program "gutcheck" from PG and run it on the ascii version. This will make sure all non-ascii characters are removed, and may point out other stylistic problems. Since this is Esperanto, you will not be able to get gutcheck to be completely silent, but it is still useful.
11) Zip everything together.
12) Upload the zip file with the clearance key to PGLAF.

I use linŭ, but many people do the same things in a Windows environment; I'm sure it can be done on a Mac as well. I will be ready to help you with each step of the process if you are so kind as to volunteer. Doing all of the above would take less than 20 hours, but things usually go wrong. Also, proofreading Esperanto takes me longer than proofreading English.