Project Gutenberg’s eBook creation process is very involved. First, it must be confirmed that the work in question is out of copyright; unless a scan is provided from another party, the print work must then be scanned page-by-page before the scan is converted to text through Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Because OCR is very error-prone, the resulting text must be proofread and compared to the original text; the proofed text is then formatted before being converted into the various eBook formats offered by Project Gutenberg. Previously, one person would work on one eBook, and it would often take months for a single eBook to be completed. Newby and Franks reported that this once cost up to $1000 per book.
	Thus, Distributed Proofreaders was created, with the aim of building a large base of volunteers who can, collectively, work on many books at once; each book is worked on by many people, who each work on one page at a time. Books are subject to two to three proofreading rounds, according to the project manager’s preference (the first round proofreads the OCR text; subsequent rounds check the previous round’s work). It is then formatted in two rounds, and “post-processed” – made ready for conversion – in two rounds, before the finished eBook is submitted to Project Gutenberg. Proofreaders and formatters complete their task with the text presented side-by-side with the scanned image of the original. An optional final round before submission to Project Gutenberg is “smooth reading”, where volunteers essentially read the finished books for leisure, keeping an eye out for any last errors or oddities in the final copy.
	Volunteers at Distributed Proofreaders are divided into different streams. Beginners can smooth read or work on the first proofreading round; as they gain more experience, they can work on the second and third proofreading rounds, and the formatting rounds. The most experienced volunteers are able to become post-processors and project managers. Volunteers with Distributed Proofreaders range from a large number of casual volunteers who may contribute only an hour per month, to a small core set of very dedicated workers who contribute multiple hours each day.
	Using Distributed Proofreaders has made the process of creating a Project Gutenberg eBook much faster, and much less expensive. Compared to previous costs of up to US$1000 per book, Distributed Proofreaders cost about US$1000 to set up; since then, the only major incremental cost (aside from the likes of server maintenance) is the price of shipping hard copies of texts to the project’s scanning and OCR stations. Proofreading is the main bottleneck of Project Gutenberg’s eBook production process, so crowdsourcing this activity to thousands of individuals makes the overall process much faster.
	For all its speed, Distributed Proofreaders does not sacrifice any accuracy. Completing multiple passes at each stage of the workflow provides extra redundancy against mistakes, and, imaginably, deliberate sabotage; the page-by-page nature of the task, and the requirement for volunteers to gain experience before continuing, makes it difficult for would-be saboteurs to interfere with much outside of a few pages in the first proofreading round. 
