One of the grow­ing stacks of books in our house that needs to be pared down—though it arises from impor­tant and use­ful work—consists of those we’ve already scanned and con­tributed to Project Guten­berg by way of Dis­trib­uted Proof­read­ers. I’m writ­ing an auc­tion list­ing today for one book (not yet for sale), Sto­ries of Later Amer­i­can His­tory. We scanned it, we ran it through DP to cre­ate a new author­i­ta­tive edi­tion, and now you can down­load it and read it and use it how­ever you want.

In a fit of exper­i­men­ta­tion, I’ve included the Guten­berg eText num­ber in the auc­tion title, and some explana­tory text and a link to the Guten­berg site.

We’ll see how it plays out. I know eBay allows links of some types, but not to third-​​party sites.

Update: In review­ing eBay’s ridicu­lously restric­tive link­ing poli­cies (“We’re just a venue,” my ass), I’ve decided I have to back off direct link­ing, and sug­gest Google search. I wish I could link there, but appar­ently I can’t. Maybe I should host the entire con­tent of the book on my web­site, and link there? Hmm.…

To com­pen­sate for eBay’s stu­pid­ity, I’ve decided to donate the entire pro­ceeds of the auc­tion to the Dis­trib­uted Proof­read­ers Foun­da­tion, the non-​​profit orga­ni­za­tion fund­ing the Dis­trib­uted Proof­read­ers vol­un­teer com­mu­nity. We’ll see how this plays out.