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