Scary numbers for a Friday morning...

[sbisson]

"98% of currently copyrighted books are out of print and effectively unobtainable." - Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive to Danny O'Brien (via Danny's excellent blog Oblomovka)

And people wonder why I have so many books? And why I love the mid list? And why I go round boosting the small press? And why I love sites like the Baen Free Library?

Comments

[rowanf.livejournal.com]

The Archive has plans to scan 1,000,000 public
domain books by 2005. If you'd like to contribute your own, pre-Disney works, just scan 'em in page by page as TIFFs and send them to the Archive. They'll keep them for you, and for the whole of posterity.

Riiiiight. Scan them page by page as TIFFS and send them to the archive. I have some amazing early books (19th century medical books mostly) but that would take the rest of my lifetime at the speed of a home scanner and frankly I have a life. I'm really glad they're working on it though.

The #($(% govt changed the tax laws about a decade ago so that unsold books counted as assets of the publisher for tax purposes rather than however it was they'd been counted before (I forget the details). This made publishers want to get rid of all of a print run before the end of the tax year and so they don't keep a backstock. Hence all the "out of stock indefinitely" copyrighted books that for all intents and purposes are out of print but they don't release the copyright. One stooopid tax law. Bah humbug.

[marypcb.livejournal.com]

I signed up for the <a href="http://texts01.archive.org/dp/>Distributed Proofreaders</a> page - I wouldn't have time to scan but proofing a few pages now and then I can fit in ;-)

Gutenburg proofreading

[rowanf.livejournal.com]

That is cool. I signed right up. :-)l