Public domain determination becomes clearer cut, more books entering the public domain thanks to … Google? Jacob Kramer-Duffield explains how Google and Project Gutenberg and the Distributed Proofreaders put their book-scanning and OCR-ing smarts into trying to solve the thorny orphan works problem to determine which out of print books have had their copyrights renewed and which haven’t. Neat. [via joho]
Tag: publicdomain
a small foray into Google Books
You can use the date operator to browse public domain books in Google Books. I’m not entirely sure why the covers of some of these books remain under copyright. Any ideas? I’ve also noticed a few scanning errors and some pretty neat finds like this one which gives the name of every librarian in the US and Canada working in a library holding over 1,000 volumes. Google Books clearly uses keyword indexing to make these books searchable. How great would it be to have this one in a database? You can see a few images that I particularly liked over at Flickr.