About
Learn about our transcription process and how to contribute to the project.
The first step in our process is to find a book. Most of our books are sourced from one of these locations:
We take great pride in knowing none of our content infringes upon any copyrights (based on the USA). We verify this in one of two ways:
Public Domain
Generally, we aim to publish books that are already in the public domain, and in particular, we ensure this by selecting books that were published before 1923. However, some books that have been published after that date are important enough to us that we dug into the copyright by searching the copyright records, and we confirmed the copyright was not renewed before publishing.
Licensced Work
Some titles were originally published with a Creative Commons license or something similar, which grants us the ability to modify and redistribute the work. Those titles retain the license information at the end of the book.
Original Content
Some of our contributors have published original content through our site. These works are copyrighted by those contributors under the author name that was given. By publishing their content on this site, they authorize our distribution of their content.
Most of the content that we find is in a PDF. We typically prioritize transcribing PDFs that have had OCR (optical character recognition) applied, which means we can copy and paste directly from the PDF into our internal Markdown format. However, OCR is not perfect, so this often requires reading through the text and correcting mistakes.
For files that do not support copying the text, we manually type the content. This is a slow process, but sometimes necessary, especially for books published before the 1800s, whose typography often has characters and abbreviations no longer in use.
We believe macrons are a useful tool for learning Latin. They are especially helpful for learning where to place the accent when pronouncing a word. To that end, we run all of our content through the Latin Macronizer and then re-read the book to correct mistakes. This is not a perfect process, so please contact us if you spot a mistake.
Next we run the book through a few custom tools to calculate word count and build the table of contents. We apply relevant tags and determine a difficulty level based on our read through of the book.
At last, once the book is fully transribed and macronized, we make the book publicly available by unlocking it and announcing the release on our Patreon page. Join us on Patreon to receive these updates.