regshoe

I've had so much fun working on Sir Isumbras at the Ford that I'm seriously considering making a proper hobby of this book digitisation. It's not all that seldom that I come across a public-domain book that I'd like to read and that isn't on Project Gutenberg, and I'd like to contribute to expanding the collections.

On the technical side, I've downloaded some OCR software which seems to be working well, so I can now do the scans-to-text bit myself. And I suspect the process will be much easier and simpler for having done it once already—besides just not having to take the time to learn as I go, there were several places working on Sir Isumbras where I could have saved myself effort if I'd had more idea, at an earlier stage of the process, of what I was going to need to do later.

So the immediate question is, what next?

I have a few ideas, but I think the first book I'm going to tackle is Jill by E. A. Dillwyn—a fun, femslashy Victorian adventure story which is comfortably out of copyright in both the UK and the US, not currently on PG and doesn't appear to be being worked on. And I like it a great deal, which is important for two reasons—first, I think it both deserves and might appeal to a wider readership; and second, I'm going to have to spend a lot of time and detail on the text of this book, so it ought to be one I enjoy reading! And there are PDF scans of the text available on archive.org, so I can make my text from those rather than having to scan the book myself, which will save work.

Other possibilities that have occurred to me:

Chantemerle, to complete the D. K. Broster collection. There is a scan of this on archive.org but it's not very good quality, and some words are illegible—good enough when you're reading it and can fill in the sense of the gaps, not so good when you need a complete text. Also, as I learnt with Sir Isumbras, the large amount of French text would be a bit of a pain to format. However, it's Broster! I might come back to this one.
The novels of Winifred Holtby, two of which (Anderby Wold and The Crowded Street) are currently old enough to be eligible for PG. Unfortunately I can't find scans of these anywhere, so I'd have to obtain a first edition and scan it myself—a cursory check suggests first editions of these are neither easy to find nor cheap, but I may see what I can do, because Holtby certainly deserves more appreciation.
Reuben Sachs by Amy Levy. PG already has The Romance of a Shop, Miss Meredith and two books of poetry, but is missing this one. Again, there's a scan on archive.org, so it wouldn't be too difficult to do.

...but I shall leave these ambitious speculations to the future and concentrate on one thing at a time, for now. :)