Intern recruiting for summer 2014 is now complete; we have a group of eight interns for this summer, and I’m excited to see what they’ll accomplish. They’re signed up for different numbers of hours depending on their credit needs, but on average each will be putting in something like 100 hours of work spread across the summer, so they could easily do a couple of books each.

Our volunteer base is also expanding, in significant part thanks to friendly press like the piece Meridian ran this week on LDS Great Works and MTP. We recently experimented with using Google Docs to do multi-user proofreading, and it didn’t work especially well. People get psychological fulfillment from having and completing specific responsibilities, especially complete books, and in the attribution-free multi-user environment the opposite was true. So, from here on out volunteers are being assigned specific projects and often complete books. This means that our project slate is expanding and that progress is likely to come in fits and starts. (Having all our interns start at the same time may also contribute to this.) That said, it looks like between interns and volunteers we could hit 50 LDS books on PG by the end of August. At the start of the year we were at 21 and now we’re at 31, so 50 is an exciting prospect.

Meridian has proposed that I write up a post with an excerpt from one of our books every couple of weeks, so keep an eye out for that. I’ll post links as they become available.

Finally, there will be a Conference weekend book release this Friday. Stay tuned.