Quote:
Originally Posted by graycyn
With luck, Google will have gotten scans of many, but there are definitely books that are near impossible to find. There's one I've been looking for for several years now from my childhood (lost in a move) and there's not a copy to be found for sale at ANY price. A few libraries supposedly have a copy according to WorldCat.
I recently sold a book, a memoir written by an author of some of my childhood books. Only one library (besides presumably the Library of Congress) is listed by WorldCat as having a copy. That book, I think was printed at a vanity press, it's also super scarce.
So it's a very real worry that some of these books won't be easily found by the time they are public domain! We are losing not only the story text, but often many wonderful illustrations too. And losing author biographical information and pictures in many cases, because that was often on the dust jacket only. This is especially true for obscure authors who only wrote one or two books, the information is just not out there on the internet in many cases.
It would be great if there were a repository for some of these books as you say!
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Interestingly, mandatory deposit of copyrighted books to the library of Congress is still the law in the US. There is no teeth to the law and it's not a requirement for copyright protection, but it exists. In theory, at least, the Library of Congress should have any work copyrighted in the US, however, I'm pretty sure they don't actually keep copies of everything.