al said:

Here's the error report on PG#3441.

great.

I'm assuming the Locations and Pages are peculiar to the reporter's ereader device, whatever it is.

since s/he mentions a kindle, and because the kindle uses "locations" as its milestone term, i would guess it's a kindle. as for "pages", i'd assume that's in the archive.org material, namely from that version of the book, which might (or not) be the version of the book on which this e-text was based...

It's quite possible that some of the reporter's proposed corrections may themselves be incorrect.

of course. that is always the case. that's why you have to compare each proposed correction against the page-scan.

Don Kretz is my preferred supplier of the corrected version, since he offered first.

"preferred supplier"? ok...

bowerbird can work on any or all of the other 15 volumes.

do you have error-reports for them?

Or, the two can collaborate on all 16, if they choose to do that. Up to them.

you might have misunderstood what i'm offering. i didn't offer to _do_ the corrections for you; i offered to build a system to show you how you could make it _fun_ for people to process the error-reports in a speedy way... and, lest it was not clear, i will code and mount a system, but i do not intend to share any code with you, or with p.g. as i said not too long ago, the ship on that sailed long ago. at this point in time, you couldn't _pay_ me to code for you. i'm willing to code a demonstration, for you and this list, but that's as far as it goes. just so we understand each other, al.

I refuse to deal with revised versions of the same etext from two different people.

you should be able -- and willing!, and thankful! -- to evaluate corrections coming in from _twenty_ people, or two _hundred_, assuming those corrections aren't overloaded with false-alarms. the cost of evaluating a correction-already-made should be nil... *** i had anticipated that i would have to tell you that you need to _instruct_ people on the best way to submit an error-report, but this person -- bless their little heart -- did an _excellent_ job... indeed, they did more than they needed to... for instance, they said this:

Location 170 (Page 4) day like this; and now I bid thee enter among Gharib s host and, "Gharib's" should have an apostrophe. day like this; and now I bid thee enter among Gharib's host and,

with an untrained naive error-reporter, you often just get that line with the "should have an apostrophe" version of the correction in it, and that line is the least useful of all of them -- totally unnecessary. also, since p.g. threw away all the pagenumbers, it's great that this wise person included the pagenumber, so we know what scan it is... otherwise, all they needed to say was this:

day like this; and now I bid thee enter among Gharib s host and, day like this; and now I bid thee enter among Gharib's host and,

the computer can tell the difference between the lines, and _highlight_ it for the person who is doing the checking, and find that line in the file, and show the page-scan for review, and then record the judgment of the reviewer to edit or stet, and then _make_ the necessary edits and save all the changes. it's all of that grunt work which my demo-program will handle. -bowerbird