Friday, August 27, 2010

Proofreading an Old Favorite, Wildside by Steven Gould!


I just finished a long overdue re-read of Wildside by Steven Gould. While this is not my favorite novel by Mr. Gould, it is the book that first introduced me to his work, and that's not to say that it isn't one of my favorites. It's a great read! Look for a review soon. . .

Also, it gave me a chance to try out a few ebook formats.

That's right, I read it in an electronic format. You see, over on his blog, Steven Gould announced that he needed some volunteers to proofread Wildside since he had to scan and OCR the text before composing the ebook. I jumped at the opportunity of course (no pun intended). What happened to his original computer file I don't know, but he has already released Jumper and Reflex as ebooks, at very reasonable prices I might add.

I recieved copies in both Mobi and EPUB formats, but since I haven't bought a handheld reader yet, I read them on my computer. I think I prefer the EPUB format over Mobipocket. There is a handy plugin for Firefox that lets you read .epub files and lets you change the background colour, font, margin width, etc. The Mobipocket reader is available as a free download, and it looks slick, but it just wasn't as convenient for me.
And now to start proofreading Helm. . . Smiley

Update: Get it here.