Item — HN Reader

Congrats, it's really great! I have a few thoughts/suggestions, but first:

Does anyone know of a competitive/practice typing site (as TypeLit, or TypeRacer) where you help digitize books (or any sort of document)?

I'm very motivated by TypeRacer's competitions (it's silly, I know), but I would be even more inclined to play if I knew that there was a "greater" purpose...!

I haven't looked into Project Gutenberg's proof reading volunteering. But, something like that? A sort of "good for humanity" reCaptcha (the original one, that helped Google to digitize books)..?

---

Ideas for TypeLit:

- It would be nice if the WPM/ACC counters updated in real time in the upper right corner, not just when changing pages

- The competitive aspect of https://play.typeracer.com/ might not be a perfect fit for your site but just wondering if a leaderboard/social element could work (probably not, but just a thought)

2 comments

When i noticed that there are only public domain works, I got an idea for an optional mode where you help digitize books by typing from scanned/OCRed works and the results get sent to organizations like the Gutenberg Project or Distributed Proofreaders[0].

In the case of Distributed Proofreaders you could automate the process even by creating a diff of your results with the current draft of the Works being worked on.

This is just a crazy idea nobody take it too seriously. [0]https://www.pgdp.net/c/

Didn't Google / Recaptcha do that for a good while but with individual words?

Yes they did, to help digitize Google Books and archives of NYT -- (from wikipedia) "The system helped to digitize the archives of The New York Times, and was subsequently used by Google Books for similar purposes" [0][1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/science/29recaptcha.html

Hello! The WPM/ACC thing will be updated really soon. As for a leaderboard/social element, it might be worth looking into once I eventually add accounts. Thanks for your suggestions!