jim said:
>   many motivated "early readers" love a particular author,
>   and would be happy to get early access to the text via
>   some kind of tool that allowed them to fix or at least mark
>   the bugs they find as a part of their reading.  "Marking" bugs
>   as a part of reading could be as simple as asking them to
>   read on a notepad or what have you and put a
>   Q-mark in the text where they think they see a bug.

while you seem to be talking about smoothreading here,
the text you quoted from me was about preprocessing...

preprocessing happens before the text goes to any proofer
-- it's scheduled immediately after o.c.r. has been done --
and it doesn't require reading of _any_ kind at all, which is
why it is about fourteen times more efficient than proofing.

a preprocessing tool finds glitches that are almost certainly
errors, and takes you to them directly in the text-file while
displaying the appropriate scan for referral, and often even
gives you buttons that will perform the desired correction...
some glitches (like spacey quotes) can even be auto-fixed.

i have demonstrated here that, for several books i tested,
this preprocessing would take the errors down to a rate of
less-than-one-error-every-10-pages, which makes the
word-by-word proofing rounds almost like smoothreading.

check out dkretz's "twisted" tool to see an example of this...

-bowerbird