Copyright laws make my head hurt. In reading through it all, it's mentioned in many places that this is for works published on or after 1978. So what does that mean for books published prior to that time, is it still under the 50 years after the author's death in that case? I know the book was published in 1942, Macardle died in 1958 (which is why I originally thought it was in the public domain, also ran across a podcast of the book stating the same).
Edit: I found my own answer from
http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm
Quote:
Date of Publication:
From 1 March 1989 through 2002
Conditions:
Created before 1978 and first published in this period
Copyright Term:
The greater of the term specified in the previous entry or 31 December 2047*
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*The previous entry dealt with books after 1977 so pretty sure it doesn't apply, at least hopeful that it doesn't apply.
While I'm all for supporting author's works, under these terms it might be pretty difficult to keep such older works that aren't considered true classics available for anyone to read. Ebook format gives us such a great opportunity to be able to preserve all books for future generations, but my fear is we'll end up losing a lot of these older books before they can be made available.