The State of North Carolina has a State Library. Among the items in the library are books that have been published by different agencies of the State. Residents of the state can actually borrow physical books from the library. Residents and non-residents can download ebooks in the library. That, in itself, is not unusual.
Something that does seem to be unusual, however, and that I just discovered about this library, is the fact that
you can request that the Library digitize specific books in the Library that are currently not available there in digital form. Then, you can download them. And
there is no charge to you for it.
Of course, they cannot do this for books not published by the State that are not yet in the public domain (to make things simple, they say none of them published "after 1924," even though some of them actually may be in the public domain for one reason or another). However, apparently
anything that has been published by an agency of the State of North Carolina is eligible, regardless of copyright status.
Before you decide that all that possibly could have been published by a state government is basically junk, let me quickly say that this offer applies to items published by such agencies as the prestigious North Carolina Museum of Art (other agencies are listed at
http://catalog.ncdcr.gov/index.html in the yellow box near the top righthand corner of the page).
I want to use the Museum as an example. They published a book, a number of years ago, entitled
Sepphoris in Galilee: Crosscurrents of Culture. I want it for my library. I could buy a used paperback copy at Amazon for $14.37, shipped. However, I am in no big hurry to obtain it, so I made a request to the State Library for them to digitize the physical copy that they have in their holdings. I notice that they have already put it in the queue. So my savings will be $14.37. I also will be getting it in a digital form (PDF), which I would prefer over a dead-tree version, and which is not available at any price at a retailer, as far as I can determine.
If this sounds interesting to you, I suggest that you do a little experiment. Do a search of books at Amazon with "North Carolina Museum of Art." If your experience is like mine, you will get 952 hits. Not all of these will be books actually published by the North Carolina Museum of Art, and so you will have to weed those out. Look through the selection for a book that you might be interested in. Then, go to the North Carolina State Library and search for the book, starting from
http://catalog.ncdcr.gov/index.html. It may have already been digitized, if so you're already in business. If it has not been digitized, you can request it, and obtain a digital copy. If you want to browse through even more books published by the Museum, including those which are out-of-print now, I recommend that you go to a meta used book search engine such as
Bookfinder, and do a search there.
Remember that you also can check other agencies of the State of North Carolina besides the Museum of Art. Again, I refer you to the list of them
here.
After you make a request, they will send you a confirmation email. You can also find your ebook, when it has been approved for digitization, in
the Library's digitization queue. Is there a caveat or downside? Only one that I know of: the Library advises that it might take 4-6 months to get to and complete your digitization request.
If you're interested in doing a search of the Library to see what they have, the best place to start may be
here.
I don't have any idea, yet, of how many other states offer this service. But I hope that it is many or, at least, that many will start doing this in the future. Don't you?