[2][3][4][5] Distributed Proofreaders was founded by Charles Franks in 2000 as an independent site to assist Project Gutenberg.

Public domain works, typically books with expired copyright, are scanned by volunteers, or sourced from digitization projects and the images are run through optical character recognition (OCR) software.

In January 2004, Distributed Proofreaders Europe started, hosted by Project Rastko, Serbia.

Books proofread centered on European culture, with a considerable proportion of non-English texts including Hebrew, Arabic, Urdu, and many others.

Notable authors whose works may be preserved in Canada but not in other parts of the world include Clark Ashton Smith, Dashiell Hammett, Ernest Hemingway, Carl Jung, A.

A. Milne, Dorothy Sayers, Nevil Shute, Walter de la Mare, Sheila Kaye-Smith and Amy Carmichael.