Access Millions of Free Books Added to the Public Domain
Your Summer Reading List is now even more accessible with a New York Public Library project. Most of the books published in America before 1964 are in the public domain because the authors did not distribute copyright. And their aversion to paperwork is our benefit, because many of them are available for free on the Internet, and there are more of them every day.
Here’s how it works : The Library of Congress has published a Catalog of Copyright Records, including all registration and renewal information for American books through the 1970s. The Internet Archive – a not -for -profit library of free materials – has digital versions of the Library of Congress listings, but someone still had to sort through all the entries to find out which books were in the public domain (and this is constantly changing after copyright expired) …
And this is where the heroes of the New York Public Library come in: in an absolutely massive project, they digitized every registration and expiration information so that it is now digitally searchable. To give you an idea of how many books we are talking about, about 80 percent of American books published between 1923 and 1964 are in the public domain.
How to access books
To get started, you can check out sites that make publicly available content such as Project Gutenberg , Standard eBooks, and The Hathi Trust , which are constantly adding new items. Another contributor is Leonard Richardson, a blogger and computer programmer based in New York who created News You Can Bruise . He created a mastodon bot called Secretly Public Domain that adds one of the newly discovered books every day. Enjoy reading!