Quote:
Originally Posted by andym
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The paragraph also mentions Google Books:
Does anyone know what the heck is happening with this project? So far as I can see, all Google books gives me is excerpts of copyright books - even when the book itself is in the public domain (eg Conrad's Nostromo).
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There are
some public domain books available for download, but as you've discovered, not all by quite a margin. The frustrating part, for me, is that they will lock out one volume of a set! It's there - one just can't access it except in 'snippet' view.
My best guess as to why is that some (not all) of the public domain books that are locked out have been reprinted relatively recently. Almost all the locked out editions will have the public domain version (locked out)
and a reprint edition. My luck has proven to hold when I discover that even the reprint edition - while it technically exists - is unavailable even on the OOP market, therefore making sure I can't access it.
Somewhere on the Google books site (might have been in a help file) it said that some of the locked books were just locked because they hadn't gotten to them to unlock them yet. I'm still hopeful that some of the books I can't access will become available, but my guess is that if there's a reprint of it, no luck.
(I'm sure there are exceptions, though, so let's hope they're the ones we really want to see.)