Excuse me if I'm wrong, and showing my ignorance, but maybe it will give better-informed MobileReaders an opportunity to chime in with more accurate information.
I thought that I have read several times that the public domain status in one country is irrelevant to what it is in another country. So, the laws about when a work goes into the public domain may differ from country to country (and probably will). People in another country from where the copyright was issued (or possibly what country that the copyright holder now resides, if different from where the copyright was issued) the copyright holder must follow the laws
where the copyright was issued, not the country where someone wants to make copies of it.
I glanced over the books that LolaMilano wanted, and all of the web addresses for the books had "uk" in them. Perhaps those were what pdurrant keyed in on. Those caught my eye immediately.
Of course, if the copyright holder wants to relinquish his or her rights to a book, he/she is completely free to do so. I don't know if he/she has to do that country-by-country or not, or if relinquishing the right within the country where the copyright holder resides or the publisher is domiciled (in the case of a company owning a copyright, such as
Conde Naste, referred to in an earlier post on this thread) is all that matters. I would think that the latter is correct
I wish that as many countries as possible would get together and create some common standards among all of them about copyright laws. It sure would save a lot of headaches for people who care about following the law, but are daunted by the prospect of all of the research necessary to find out the copyright status of a book that they want to own.
BTW--I've read--in an excellent post on the subject in a post or two here on MobileRead
in this forum--that the people in the U.S. making the rules about such things are working toward simplying the rules and changing the time periods that copyrights issued here in the U.S. can last. If I can, I'll try to find that post tonight (but my ability to understand how to do searches on this Site is very limited--I don't know if I'll be able to find it).
To LolaMilano: This is a longshot. However, I have seen, on a very few publishers' websites, solicitation by them to customers for books that they (the customers) would like to see reprinted. I think that that is cool, for one reason, it makes someone else (the publisher) have to do all of the research to find out if a work is still in copyright.
Since I didn't think that I would ever want to avail myself of that offer, I didn't bother to remember the names of those reprinters, but I will in the future.