And, of course, fixing more errors is of course a noble goal. Are these corrections going to make it upstream to Gutenberg?
It's an issue worth raising to the team. In the spirit of GPL, I think reporting any instances of clear typos in the source text upstream would be a good idea.
The problem is that so much work is done to the text as part of StandardEbook production that we can't exactly just submit a single patch or diff. It would be difficult to identify the textual corrections from stylistic changes in an automatic way, unless we were to enforce typo corrections to occur in a single commit. We're currently encouraged to use an [Editorial] tag when modernizing spelling such as "any one" -> "anyone", so perhaps we should see about a [Transcription Error] tag for obvious typos.
The upshot is that all of the books' sources are hosted on GH. So an interested party could, in theory, review the commit history and pull out what look to be typo corrections. See, for example:
https://github.com/standardebooks/emile-gaboriau_the-lerouge...
Failing that, the contributor could simply manually keep track of any typos they fix and report them to GP.
Fixing typos is fine I guess, but books are the result of an era and grammar or writing style is an inherent part of a book that should not be altered.
Editing is a lot work, and their efforts are appreciated. But most of that involves the application of existing rules (curly quotes etc.) and therefore doesn't meet the creativity standard of copyright.
I guess the texts are out there anyway, and it doesn't make much of a difference. But I'm reminded of the art world, where many a painting is long out of copyright, yet only the Museums have access and the insist setting up a lightbox and taking a photo is a creative endeavour worthy of protection from the prying eyes of the non-paying public.
> [T]hose who are hesitant to use photos of works that are in the public domain […] should know that under the law if the image is “slavish,” a mere reproduction, a plain unadorned exact image, they can use it and do not have to pay anyone a licensing fee.