Millions More Books Now In the Public Domain

Due to a quirk in copyright legislation, millions of books and stores published before 1964 are now in the public domain. The trick is finding which ones are now free. This Vice article summarizes the situation and provides some links for resources for finding them.

Prior to 1964, books had a 28-year copyright term. Extending it required authors or publishers to send in a separate form, and lots of people didn’t end up doing that. Thanks to the efforts of the New York Public Library, many of those public domain books are now free online. Through the 1970s, the Library of Congress published the Catalog of Copyright Entries, all the registration and renewals of America’s books. The Internet Archive has digital copies of these, but computers couldn't read all the information and figuring out which books were public domain, and thus could be uploaded legally, was tedious. The actual, extremely convoluted specifics of why these books are in the public domain are detailed in a post by the New York Public Library, which recently paid to parse the information in the Catalog of Copyright Entries.

In a massive undertaking, the NYPL converted the registration and copyright information into an XML format. Now, the old copyrights are searchable and we know when, and if, they were renewed. Around 80 percent of all the books published from 1923 to 1964 are in the public domain, and lots of people had no idea until now.

Kudos to the NYPL for taking the initiative on this.

Out of curiousity, I did a search on Project Gutenberg for a few authors that I remember reading as a teen and found a trove of books and stories from authors like Mack Reynolds, Edgar Pangborn, and H. Beam Piper, to name just a few. Some of these aren't connected to the situation noted above, but they're still worth looking at.