for the U.S., they do go through quite a few rounds of proofreading and editing. Here's a chart that shows their process:
http://www.pgdp.net/c/faq/DPflow.php
Nonsense; this is not a Gutenberg website. This is a completely different company that claims to have scanned, proofread, and uploaded nearly half the books at the Gutenberg USA site. If they're making the effort to help out Gutenberg, that's great. If they're doing it wrong--not so great. They say:
"The Project Managers pick whatever books we can find. Due to US copyright laws, we are severely limited in the books we are allowed to work with. We go to Used & Rare bookshops and scour the Internet websites & auctions. We check out rare books from libraries and scan them. We obtain page images from other archive sites. We try to find books that we think people would enjoy reading and that we can find at an acceptable price."
Gee, wouldn't it be nice to actually bother finding the most correct edition of the book rather than "whatever books we can find." Do you know how many errors are fixed in subsequent editions of print books? Plenty. For that matter, many old books have been sliced and diced over the years by editors for various reasons, often religious ones, to the point of it being a painstaking process of putting together a correct edition today. A great example (among hundreds I could give) is James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Only the original 1824 Longman's 1st edition has the text in it's entirety until Oxford Press came out with one in 1981. That 1st edition generally goes for better than a thousand bucks if you're lucky enough to find one. And even that edition had at least seven typesetting errors that I'm aware of (and considering Hogg's mixture of Scotch and English spellings, only a scholar would catch). Only a few copies were sold. The next edition was in 1937 and had 115 pages omitted and the text was heavily redacted. For the next hundred years or more, nearly every subsequent edition relied on the 1937 edition making them also incorrect. One of them published by L Shiells and Co. came out with an 1895 edition which claimed to follow the original edition, but scholar John Carey found it had errors or omissions on all but three of its 266 pages. Campion Reprints in 1924, and later Cresset Press in 1947, both came out with reprints that followed the 1824 1st edition, but they both changed some of Hogg's deliberate (and often playful) spellings and some of the punctuation. Thus, it wasn't until 1981 that a decent reprint of the 1st edition came out (even fixing the seven errors in the original.) But while the original text in not under copyright, Oxford Press' version is, so you cannot use it legally to copy from for Gutenberg. Not that any of the amateurs scanning texts willy-nilly for Gutenberg would know, or care about, true scholarly work anyway. And this is exactly why there will ALWAYS be a market for fine editions of reprints by real publishers.
