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Old 08-16-2019, 08:15 PM   #22
SteveEisenberg
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Join Date: Jun 2008
Location: near Philadelphia USA
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Quote:
Originally Posted by crich70 View Post
It's possible that the additions are in the portions of the book that you didn't get in the sample.
Lots of things are possible.

I think the real issue for me is whether the book being in the public domain means that I can read the eBook for free. Without that, it's a meaningless legal concept.

The Patricia Clark Library here seems to have maybe 26,000 titles. The U.S. Project Gutenberg has 39,000 titles, a large portion the same as here, probably with different proofreading. That's only the tiniest percent of the millions (tens of millions?) of public domain books. Another point of comparison is the 132,943 eBooks in the, I believe, mostly copyrighted Brooklyn Public Library Overdrive collections. 117,504 are available for Kindle and 127,534 as eEPUB. Plus Brooklyn has many thousands more in other collections like the Cloud Library. And despite all the cost for a library to lease an encrypted ePUB, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Singapore, and I'm sure other places, have more distinct titles than Brooklyn.

So -- having a vast new number of identified public domain books doesn't really give a mechanism for them getting more than a tiniest sliver to us in a legitimate way, regardless of whether someone was selling the proofread scans despite to the book being recognized as public domain.

Maybe some day there will be a more reliable character recognition method to convert a PDF graphic into ePUB and mobi files. A majority of the books that I'd want to read, among those in the 1924-63 public domain cache, are probably sitting at openlibrary.org, where there are both PDF and ePUB files typically having truly vast numbers of distracting (and even indecipherable) scan errors.

P.S. Part of the answer is to volunteer at Distributed Proofreaders, which I have done a little. It is hard work!

Last edited by SteveEisenberg; 08-16-2019 at 08:19 PM.
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