....are you interested in text preservation or in manuscript preservation? PG & DP while they do good work for society don't actually do either of those things. What they do is transcription of a book into ASCII or something close to ASCII -- even when transcribing into HTML or ISO. The end result is usually something that is readable and recognizable as being somehow more-or-less related to what the original author wrote and the original author published. Is it "correct" ? Of course not -- one cannot talk about "correctness" when something is 1) intended to be readable by today's audience, and 2) has been transcribed into something that is a small subset of what was available to publishers even by the 1700s 3) the chosen subset is primarily dictated by what can be easily input from a standard IBM chicklet keyboard and more-or-less OCR'ed by standard OCR software 4) a subset of punctuation and simplified punctuation rules have been adopted in practice which differ somewhat from that which obviously the author and publisher put in their books. One might be tempted to say that what PG & DP actually do is "word preservation" but actually they don't even really do that either. Its really re-interpretation and republishing from one format -- on paper by professional publishers a long long time ago, into another format -- either a PG specific non-re-flowable electronic format built around "teletype" standards of the early 1970s, "ASCII, 70 chars more-or-less per line" similar to AP wire format, or to HTML for lowest-common-denominator browsers -- said constraint being in practice more likely the HTML to EPUB and/or HTML to MOBI converter routines and the limitations of EPUB and/or MOBI stand-alone reader hardware -- and doing so in a way that might actually be read by one or another target audiences on said devices. Are these efforts successful? I think so -- for example when I see a friend of mine has bought a new iPad and is happily reading a text I produced for PG prior to the iPad's announcement and my friend didn't even realize that I wrote it in HTML and PG published it -- because of course Apple strips out the PG header and transcriber acknowledgements before converting it to Apple DRM'ed EPUB and redistributing it as "Apple's own free book available only from the Apple iPad Store"! [ Thank You Jobs -- who's "1984" now??? ]