How can proofreading a book by a group of volunteers take more time than translating the whole book by a single person?
It’s the ‘norm-palatable’ part more than the proofreading aspect, unfortunately, and I’m not sure that can be readily made volunteer work
As far as I can tell, the proofreading part began in late 2013, and involved over two thousand pages of content to proofread through Youtopia. As far as I can tell, the only Sequence-related volunteer work on the Youtopia site involves translation into non-English languages, so the public volunteer proofreading is done and likely has been done for a while (wild guess, probably somewhere in mid-summer 2014?). MIRI is likely focusing on layout and similar publishing-level issues, and as far as I’ve been able to tell, they’re looking for a release at the end of the year that strongly suggests that they’ve finished the proofreading aspect.
That said, I may have outdated information: the Sequence eBook has been renamed several times in progress for a variety of good reasons, and I’m not sure Youtopia is the current place most of this is going on, and AlexVermeer may or may not be lead on this project and may or not be more active elsewhere than these forums. There are some public project attempts to make an eReader-compatible version, though these don’t seem much stronger from a reading order perspective.
In fairness, doing /good/ layout and ePublishing does take more specialized skills and some significant time, and MIRI may be rewriting portions of the work to better handle the limitations of a book format—where links are less powerful tools, where a large portion of viewer devices support only grayscale, and where certain media presentation formats aren’t possible. At least from what I’ve seen in technical writing and pen-and-paper RPGs, this is not a helpfully parallel task: everyone needs must use the same toolset and design rules, or all of their work is wasted. There was also a large amount of internal MIRI rewriting involved, as even the early version made available to volunteer proofreaders was significantly edited.
Less charitably, while trying to find this information I’ve found references to an eBook project dating back to late 2012, so nine months may be a low-end estimate. Not sure if that’s the same project or if it’s a different one that failed, or if it’s a different one that succeeded and I just can’t find the actual eBook result.
It’s the ‘norm-palatable’ part more than the proofreading aspect, unfortunately, and I’m not sure that can be readily made volunteer work
As far as I can tell, the proofreading part began in late 2013, and involved over two thousand pages of content to proofread through Youtopia. As far as I can tell, the only Sequence-related volunteer work on the Youtopia site involves translation into non-English languages, so the public volunteer proofreading is done and likely has been done for a while (wild guess, probably somewhere in mid-summer 2014?). MIRI is likely focusing on layout and similar publishing-level issues, and as far as I’ve been able to tell, they’re looking for a release at the end of the year that strongly suggests that they’ve finished the proofreading aspect.
That said, I may have outdated information: the Sequence eBook has been renamed several times in progress for a variety of good reasons, and I’m not sure Youtopia is the current place most of this is going on, and AlexVermeer may or may not be lead on this project and may or not be more active elsewhere than these forums. There are some public project attempts to make an eReader-compatible version, though these don’t seem much stronger from a reading order perspective.
In fairness, doing /good/ layout and ePublishing does take more specialized skills and some significant time, and MIRI may be rewriting portions of the work to better handle the limitations of a book format—where links are less powerful tools, where a large portion of viewer devices support only grayscale, and where certain media presentation formats aren’t possible. At least from what I’ve seen in technical writing and pen-and-paper RPGs, this is not a helpfully parallel task: everyone needs must use the same toolset and design rules, or all of their work is wasted. There was also a large amount of internal MIRI rewriting involved, as even the early version made available to volunteer proofreaders was significantly edited.
Less charitably, while trying to find this information I’ve found references to an eBook project dating back to late 2012, so nine months may be a low-end estimate. Not sure if that’s the same project or if it’s a different one that failed, or if it’s a different one that succeeded and I just can’t find the actual eBook result.