If you haven’t visited The Open Library, PG says you should become acquainted with this fabulous trove of old and less-old books.
From The Open Library:
One web page for every book ever published. It’s a lofty but achievable goal.
To build Open Library, we need hundreds of millions of book records, a wiki interface, and lots of people who are willing to contribute their time and effort to building the site.
To date, we have gathered over 20 million records from a variety of large catalogs as well as single contributions, with more on the way.
Open Library is an open project: the software is open, the data are open, the documentation is open, and we welcome your contribution. Whether you fix a typo, add a book, or write a widget–it’s all welcome. We have a small team of fantastic programmers who have accomplished a lot, but we can’t do it alone!
Link to the rest at The Open Library – About Us
One cool feature PG hadn’t seen before was the ability to easily embed public domain books into your website.
You click on the book cover to see the listing or click on the READ button to be taken to the first page of the book itself.
PG found some interesting images in The Hunting of the Snark (again, public domain):
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So is the concept that since the Open Library has possession of a physical copy and limits access to “borrows”, that they’re not violating copyright?
Seems strange, but if that could work it would sure open up a lot of reading material to people that currently have more limited access.
More precisely, they claim that a print license is also an ebook license and licensing the first automatically grants the latter.
This puts them on the side of the BPHs that claimed old pbook contracts that made no mention of digital or audio rights automatically granted them too. Didn’t fly in court and neither will the Open Library’s scan-n-ocr rights claim.
Wanting does not guarantee getting.
I’ve borrowed some out of print books from them before. I’ve appreciated the service. Yes, some of the books are very poorly OCR’d, but when faced with no access to a book at all, I’ll take the poorly OCR’d version.
I do wish they had a history of past loans for users to reference. That would be handy.
How is it different from Project Gutenberg?
It lends out books both old and new, including modern commercial books that are still under copyright.
Which they don’t deny.
Gutenberg, Feedbooks, and others moving out-of-copyright books give them away outright.
I’ve checked things out from there before, but a lot of the material is very poorly OCR’d. Very.
There has been some question about the legality of the Library’s “self licensing” of ebook rights for non-PD titles through ownership of print editions.
https://publishingperspectives.com/2019/01/copyright-battle-internet-archives-open-library-authors-guild-society-of-authors/
Nobody disputes distribution of PD and CC titles but there’s questionable material in there. Some care is required.
I hadn’t heard that, but good points, Felix.
It’s been an ongoing issue for a while now.
Teleread’s been pointing to it for years but apparently it wasn’t prominent enough (or the establishment was too busy griping about Amazon) to notice.
Last year, the SFWA noticed:
https://the-digital-reader.com/2018/01/09/sfwa-finally-notices-internet-archives-decade-old-open-library-decides-piracy/
As of this year, they’ve been noticed by the establishment, both the Author’s (nee Publishers’) Guild and the Society of Authors.
The Society of Authors gave them until February to stop serving books to the UK. Don’t know if they’ve complied.