Information technology and culture: ABBYY to digitize all 90 volumes of works of Leo Tolstoy by the crowd sourcing method

The ABBYY Company, the linguistic software developer, and the specialists of the State Museum of Leo Tolstoy started the work on creation of full and free digital archive of the works of the author. This was announced today at the press-conference of the company.

“Tolstoy in one click” – that is the name of the project to the implementation of which are involved both sides. Thekla Tolstaya, the project manager and the great-great-granddaughter of the writer, having opened the press-conference, explained that the main goal is to provide the 90-volume collection of works of Tolstoy / that includes diaries and letters/ with an open access so that any work can be easily and free downloaded on e-book, iPhone, iPad or other device. Tolstaya also noted that free access to the electronic archive is absolutely necessary as it corresponds to the main request of the classical author – the gratuitous distribution of his works.

The web site of the project читаемтолстого.рф was launched on June 18. Any Internet user can participate in its development: it is sufficient to register at the web site and recognize 20 pages of the text by the program ABBYY FineReader. After that, the recognized text will pass another two levels of the professional inspection.

Currently, the most complete collection is available only in PDF format. As George Lipich the leader of ABBYY Russia says thanks to the new project all works will be available in formats fb2 and epub. The creators of the project hope that by September 9 / Tolstoy’s birthday/ the substantial part of the work will have been done.