Everyone reading this is probably aware of the concept of "open access," and has at least some knowledge of it. There is a little bit of "fudge factor" in the phrase, but generally all open access materials (books, journals, articles, maybe other media) are
free to the general public.
Universities tend to have the most repositories of open access materials it seems, and maybe the largest ones, too. They are non-profit institutions (for the most part), after all. But even quite a few for-profit publishers are getting into the act, and providing at least a token amount of open access stuff. Such is the case with Gorgias Press. It is a scholarly, academic-oriented publisher.
I noticed that their title
The Historiography of Music in Global Perspective, edited by Sam Mirelman, is among their open access works. Here's a short blurb at Gorgias Press, about it:
This volume examines the perception of music’s past, in all its historical, geographical and cultural breadth. The wide-ranging collection of papers address the interpretation of past music cultures from the earliest records of antiquity until the present.
Amazon sells it (in the hardcover format only, apparently). Their least expensive price for the tome is $131.25.
See this Amazon webpage. (Full disclosure: the same book sells for $78.74 directly from Gorgias Press (shame on you, Amazon, for being so much more expensive on a book than a competitor!)
If you want a
free copy from Gorgias Press, you'll have to get it digitally, and only in the PDF format. Here is
the direct download link to the ebook. All of this is on the "up-and-up," honest, legal, and all of that. The words "GorgiasOpen" appear in the URL that I just gave. above, for the ebook. It's shown in
the Gorgias Press Open Repository. Near the bottom of the webpage, it lets us know that "All works in the Gorgias Open Repository are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License." Translation: they're free (within certain restrictions). If you check the repository, you might even find some other titles that you want to grab, all for free.