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September 22, 2005
Just one generation ago, the movie studios were up in arms about a new
technology known as the video-cassette recorder. Jack Valenti, president of the
Motion Picture Association of America, testified to Congress in 1982 that "the
VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston
strangler is to the woman home alone." A movie studio sued Sony for
manufacturing and selling the Betamax, the first widely marketed VCR. The case
went all the way up to the Supreme Court, which in a 5-4 decision finally made
it clear that using a VCR to tape TV shows was fair use. The decision not only
legitimized the new consumer technology, and all the benefits it brought to the
public, but also ended up helping those same movie studios earn billions of
dollars from the home video market that the VCR enabled.
It's worth remembering that case when thinking about the lawsuit filed
yesterday against Google by the Author's Guild, for digitizing copyrighted books
from libraries and making them searchable online. (Although the books are
searchable, no more than a handful of sentence-sized snippets can be read
online, unless the book is in the public domain or the publishers give
permission for more to be viewable.)
Once again, the issue boils down to fair use in a new application that could
greatly benefit the public and bring new revenues and other benefits to
copyright holders. While this particular issue has not yet been decided in
court, and various legal scholars have taken both sides of the issue, Google has
what looks like a good case for fair use both for the service itself and for the
digitization necessary to provide it. In the actual service, the snippets
provided to readers are very small, cannot reasonably substitute for access to
the entire work, and will probably have a net-positive effect for the market for
the work. The digitization, not unlike the complete home taping of a TV show, is
not distributed, and is the minimum necessary to support the ultimate use-- in
this case, full-text searching to identify books one may wish to track down and
read.
Even when full text is not available online to the public, as it is in the
books listed here at The Online Books Page, simply providing the ability to
search a vast library of materials can do a lot to help people find books that
would be useful to them, and then read them by checking them out of a library or
buying them. The resulting purchases by libraries and consumers could
potentially mean a lot more revenue for authors, publishers, and other copyright
holders.
Which is why I'm hoping for an outcome that supports the Google Library
project. While a Betamax-style court ruling affirming that providing a
full-text search engine for copyrighted books is fair use would be one such
favorable outcome, and one that would set a useful precedent, a settlement based
on such mutual understanding would be a lot less expensive for the Author's
Guild and for Google, and I hope that the parties can come to such a settlement.
(I especially hope that the academic groups that were making threatening noises
against Google in the preceding months simmer down as well. Academics should be
in the best positions to understand the benefits of liberal fair-use rights for
education and research, and thus for creating the monographs that we write and
that Google seeks to index.)
Congress may also be able to help here. One of the reasons the "opt in"
policy favored by some publisher groups won't work particularly well for doing
library-scale text searching is that copyright holders of many older books are
now unreachable, and their books are out of print, but still of interest to some
readers and researchers. Enacting reasonable rules for the reuse of "orphaned
works", the recent subject of hearings by the Library of Congress, would make it
easier for indexers like Google and publishers to come to workable, amicable
arrangements for applications like Google Print. It would also enable neglected
works to more easily benefit and educate readers around the world. Congress also
has the power to more clearly note fair-use exemptions in the area of search
indexing, which would make it easier both for this project and for other search
applications-- including those we use regularly-- to operate without fear of
unwarranted legal action.
I'm also looking forward to a lot of public domain material soon being made
freely readable in full online via the Google Lihrary project and other
mass-digitization efforts mentioned in this forum. I hope that the public-domain
side of the Google Print service can continue unabated even as this lawsuit
continues.
John Mark Ockerbloom, Editor
August 25, 2005
The editor of this site is taking a vacation for the end of the summer. There
will be no updates to the site (or only minimal ones) between tonight and
September 7. But he leaves you behind with many books to choose from on the
existing site. We'll be back with lots more new listings in September!
August 17, 2005
The Online Books Page, and other Penn Library web servers, will be
unavailable for several hours on Saturday, August 20, while upgrades are made to
the Penn Library's electrical system.
So select your online weekend reading in advance, and have a good weekend!
We've been adding lots of books lately, and may well be picking up the pace
substantially over the next few months.
April 28, 2005
Several projects have now been announced to digitize millions of titles and
put them online for free access. We're hoping that these will see fruition in
the next few years, and are working behind the scenes to try to accommodate
them.
The latest such initiative, announced by 19 European national libraries (see Deutsche
Welle story) pledges support for a European project to "safeguard
literature". As of yet, the project has not been formally funded, but the story
implies an interest in building on smaller-scale projects like Gallica, run by France's national library
This joins the already-underway Google Library
Project, which already plans to digitize millions of volumes from 5
libraries in the US and the UK, and make the public domain titles freely
readable online. Before this, Carnegie Mellon University had announced the Million Book Project,
which so far has scanned about 10,000 volumes using scanners in India, China,
and elsewhere.
We welcome these initiatives, firmly believing "the more, the merrier" when
it comes to putting books online for free. While we haven't been listing many
new titles lately, we have been working behind the scenes to upgrade our
infrastructure to handle the much higher volume of books online that these
projects may produce. The first visible sign of these upgrades has been in our
browsing
interfaces, which now show slices out of the collection, and provide some
new tools for getting quickly to the slices you want, instead of simply
outputting everything that begins with a given letter all at once. Also planned
are upgrades to our search, as well as
new facilities for bulk-loading large chunks of cataloging information via
technologies like OAI and similar
initiatives. (Our first round of upgrades also included new facilities for
automated output; see, for instance, our RSS feed for new
additions.)
It will take a while for these mass digitization projects to bear fruit. And
the demands of high-quantity projects might not produce the best experience at
first. Google Print, for instance, currently restricts access outside the US
even to titles that are public domain outside the US, and within the US they put
up some roadblocks to printing and saving images even to public domain titles.
Gallica's interface might not be the easiest to use for non-French speakers, or
for folks who don't use the Adobe Reader plugin to load books a page at a time.
The Million Book Project also has to work out quality control issues with
respect to its scans, metadata, and interface.
But the books are coming, and hopefully over time the reading experience will
improve. We hope to continue to provide one-stop easy access to the best
offerings of both these massive projects and countless smaller initiatives as
well. Like the large projects, we will undoubtedly have to struggle to balance
quantity and quality, and bulk-loaded cataloging information is probably not
going to be as good in some ways as the manually cataloged entries we've
accumulated to date, at least initially. We welcome suggestions and assistance
in our attempts to provide the best access to lots of books with minimal
overhead.
We're quite excited about the future, and hope you are too. May your reading
choices be enjoyable and plentiful!
John Mark Ockerbloom, Editor
October 16, 2003Project Gutenberg announced yesterday that it
had reached its long-standing goal of releasing 10,000 free titles to the
Internet, and that it would soon also release a DVD of most of these titles.
Founded in 1971 by Michael Hart, and built and maintained by hundreds of
volunteers, Project Gutenberg is the longest-running project producing and
distributing online books. It's also one of the Net's largest and best-known
such projects. Its mission, according to its stated history and philosophy, is to "make
information, books and other materials available to the general public in forms
a vast majority of the computers, programs and people can easily read, use,
quote, and search."
Gutenberg's output has expanded greatly recently, with half of the 10,000
titles released in the last 18 months. Much of the surge has been due to the
work of the Distributed Proofreaders project,
the Gutenberg Radio project for computer-generated audio editions, and Gutenberg Australia, the first of what may
be several non-US-based Gutenberg branches. (The surge has been strong enough
that The Online Books Page has fallen a few months behind in listing Gutenberg
titles, but we hope to close this gap before long.) Along with new releases,
Gutenberg has also re-released a number of older titles with new formats and
corrections from volunteers, which the project is always interested in
receiving.
Michael Hart, still directing the project after 32 years, also announced that
nearly all of these titles would be released on a single DVD shortly. (The only
titles left off would be the human genome data and the audio books, for space
reasons, and the Gutenberg Australia releases, for copyright reasons.)
With its original goal now met, Gutenberg has no intention of slowing down.
Michael Hart ultimately hopes that all public domain books (and as many
copyrighted books as possible) will eventually be available through Gutenberg,
and is now contemplating what milestones to aim for next.
Congratulations to Project Gutenberg and all its volunteers! And I look
forward to seeing title #1,000,000 someday.
June 30, 2003In June of 1993, 10 years
ago this month, I announced the CMU School of Computer Science web site to the
world. Among the pages on the new site was a page linking to a few places you
could find books on the Net.
The original announcement that went out to the Net didn't even mention the
books page. It was just another page on a departmental web site. It had a few
links to some books that Robert
Stockton, a collegue of mine, had adapted for the Web from Project Gutenberg. And it had a few links to
Project Gutenberg's main FTP site, and some other book FTP and Gopher sites.
Gutenberg itself had fewer than 100 books, but its founder was claiming that
they'd have over 10,000 before long. Most folks, myself included, found it hard
to believe there'd be that many online in the foreseeable future.
Within a year or so, it was clear that this books page wasn't just going to
be just another web page. People wanted a one-stop site for looking up titles
and authors; I obliged. (Not a big deal, I thought, with fewer than 100 books
per site.) Then they started sending me information about more books I should
list. I soon had to go to a database, which I figured would hold things for a
while. (My database program originally had an upper limit of 10,000 titles; I
figured I wasn't likely to exceed that any time soon.)
As more books went online, new issues arose. Proposals to censor the Net
emerged at the university, and then in the government: I started Banned Books
Online to alert folks of what this could mean for online books and for free
expression in general. Copyright law also shifted over the years, becoming more
and more restrictive just as the Net was making the benefits of free online
books apparent to citizens at large. So I started to gather information about
copyright, and pass along messages urging copyright reform, and trying to
organize folks producing and using online books. The Book People list was one
of the results.
"Where are the women?" a friend of mine asked one day, enraged that the early
offerings of the Net, like those in the typical unversity "canon" were nearly
all male. Thus did Mary Mark begin A Celebration of Women
Writers, as a partner site to mine. (In the years to follow, we'd also
become partners in marriage and parenthood too. We're happy to report that both
of our kids are already enthusiastically picking up the books that are all
around the house, though we haven't let them at the scanner yet.)
Despite my "day job" being computer science, the site was rapidly pulling me
toward the library world. Not long after graduation, then, I was happy to take
up Penn's offer to work in their library designing digital library programs and
projects. And, yes, as time permitted, continuing to develop The Online Books
Page.
At the 10-year mark, we now have 20,000 active listings of freely readable
books and serials. I'm also very pleased to report that, the same day we hit
20,000 listings overall, we also reached 4,000 listings of books by women. 20%
might not seem like much, but back when Mary started the Celebration, the figure
wasn't much more than 10%. Over 200 of these books were put up by Mary herself,
many with help from her Build-a-Book collarborators, on the Celebration website.
And I think that her site has helped inspire many other folks to put up books by
women as well, which we've subsequently listed.
Several thousand more books are online, just waiting to be listed. (OAI
technology and database upgrades I'll be installing later this year, as soon as
I get a bit more Spare Time[tm], should speed up these listings considerably.)
Gutenberg alone now has more than 8,000 etexts of various sizes, and is on track
to have 10,000 within the year. And many other sites are now breaking new ground
in online books, such as the Distributed
Proofreaders high-volume book production, the California eScholarship initiative
putting recent scholarly works online, or the Internet Public Library's online listings and
services, just to name a few.
People occasionally write to me to thank me for all these books, apparently
under the impression that I'm responsible for putting them up. But actually,
I've produced almost none of them. I've tried my best to be a catalyst and guide
for these online books, but without all you folks producing, reading, and
sharing these books online, my site would still be a little static web page,
rather than one of many gateways to an ever-growing library online.
Thank you all for your work, your sharing, and your reading. And I'm looking
forward to many more things to celebrate in many more anniversaries to come.
John Mark OckerbloomEditor, The Online Books Page
June 29, 2003Two new bills introduced in
the US Congress this past week aim to increase public access to literature.
HR 2601, the Public Domain Enhancement Act, would require that the owners of
copyrighted works from the US more than 50 years old file with the Copyright
Office and pay a nominal fee ($1 in the bill as proposed) in order to keep the
copyright in force. Works not so renewed would fall into the public domain. The
documentation included with the fee would also make it easier for folks who
wanted to get permissions for older works that remain in copyright to find the
current owners of the copyright.
I encourage folks in the US to write their legislators asking them to support
and co-sponsor this bill. This will be needed to get it out of committee and
passed into law. It could allow many more books that are no longer commercially
exploited to be reused and put online by the public, while not putting undue
burdens on those that want to keep their copyrights on older work. Potentially,
this bill could thus undo much of the damage of recent copyright extensions. For
more information, see eldred.cc. (You can sign
an online petition there in favor of the Act; for maximum effect, though, write
your Congressfolk personally as well.)
Another bill, HR 2613, would place in the public domain research articles
produced by certain federally funded research projects. Although these projects
are funded by taxpayer dollars, the reports they produce are often far out of
reach of the public, published in subscription journals that in some cases can
cost more than $19,000 per year for a single subscription! The intent of this
bill is to make this work freely readable by all, to advance the progress of
science and medicine around the world. (I haven't yet seen a text for this bill,
but look up HR 2613 at thomas.loc.gov in
the next few days.) Much of the groundwork for this bill has been laid by the Public Library of Science project.
With or without this bill, academic researchers have been increasingly
resisting a system in which they write and review articles for free, and then
their institutions have to buy them back from for-profit publishers at
exorbitant prices. In response, a number of scholarly, peer-reviewed journals
now provide their content free for all to read, either immediately, or after a
short delay. In the coming weeks, we'll be listing many such journals in the Serials section of
The Online Books Page, when these journals are tracked by major universities,
and have at least a year's worth of content permanently and freely available for
all to read. I hope that scholars will increasingly support and write for these
journals, both to relieve the financial pressure on their own institutions
paying ever-larger serials fees, and to share their knowledge with the world.
John Mark Ockerbloom, Editor
January 15, 2003In a 7-2
decision, the US Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of the Sonny
Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Under this act, no copyrights on published
works will expire into the public domain in the United States until 2019 at the
earliest. The decision also makes it possible for those copyrights to be
extended further before then. Among other things, this means that books
published in 1923 or later may be indefinitely kept from being posted online in
the US.
The official Supreme court decision (including the two dissents) is available
in PDF on the
Supreme Court Website.
The decision does not prevent Congress itself from reconsidering its stance
on copyrights, or artists from volunteering to contribute their works to the
public (whether through public domain status or through licenses like those
suggested by the Creative
Commons). I hope that folks who care about publicly available online books
will continue to encourage their availability through channels like these.
Somewhat belatedly, I should note one small bright spot in recent US
copyright developments: for the first time in US law, copyrights to a large
volume of old unpublished material entered the public domain here at the
start of 2003. The US Copyright Office has an explanation of what's now
available.
Also, in many other countries, a year's worth of copyrights (both for
published and unpublished works) expired at the start of 2003. In the European
Union and other "life+70" countries, copyrights of authors who died in 1932
expired. In Canada and other "life+50" countries, copyrights of authors who died
in 1952 expired.
For more information about copyrights and permissions around the world, see
this page.
John Mark Ockerbloom, Editor
February 20, 2002The United States
Supreme Court has agreed to hear an appeal by Eric Elred and other public-domain
advocates challenging the retrospective aspects of the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright
Term Extension Act. (Here's more information on the
case, from the plaintiffs.)
The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to "promote the Progress of
Science and the useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and
Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". The
plaintiffs argue that progress of science and arts is not promoted when works
that have already been created and published are delayed from entering the
public domain. Copyright creates incentives for authors and other artists to
create and publish new works. But, the plaintiffs argue, once a work has been
introduced to the public under an established rule of copyright terms, further
extensions to its copyright term can't provide additional incentive for
something that has already happened. (It's even harder to argue that such
extensions can provide any new incentives to authors who are no longer alive--
the new extensions almost always only apply long after an author has died.)
Instead, the extensions stop works from entering the public domain, where the
progress of science and the arts would be promoted by having the works freely
distributed, performed, and reused in new works. Furthermore, the repeated
extension of existing copyright terms means that the Constitution's "limited
Times" could be effectively unlimited, as copyrights about to expire could
continue to be extended in this manner indefinitely. Hence, the plaintiffs
conclude, retrospective extensions of copyright are unconstitutional.
The Supreme Court accepts only a small fraction of the cases brought to it.
Its acceptance of the Eldred case instantly put the battle over copyright and
the public domain into the public spotlight. Should the plaintiffs prevail,
thousands of books and other works, everything from overlooked classics of
Harlem Renaissance poetry to widely-loved books like
Winnie-the-Pooh, would immediately become eligible for going
online. Interests on both sides of the case will now be drawing up arguments and
amicus briefs, in preparation for the hearings later this year.
A related case, Golan vs.
Ashcroft, is also challenging the constitutionality of the 1994 GATT
copyright restorations, the only time Congress has actually removed materials
from the public domain and put them back into copyright. Those restorations have
also made it extremely difficult to verify the copyright status of most works of
foreign origin published between 1923 and 1964. The case is currently in
district court, and the Supreme Court's eventual ruling of the Eldred case will
undoubtedly affect its outcome.
Major developments in these cases will be reported at this site; for
day-to-day developments, or to collaborate on the appeal, check the OpenLaw site at Harvard. If the
judges do find in favor of the public domain, we will be very happy to list any
newly freed books at this site.
John Mark Ockerbloom, Editor
February 1, 2002Two large collections
of American 19th-century literature are now available freely for all. When
complete, they will add more than 10,000 new online books for readers to enjoy.
At Michigan, the Making of
America books collection now has over 8,500 titles, or about 7000 more than
existed when this collection was first indexed by The Online Books Page in 1997.
This collection focuses on American social history from the pre-Civil War period
through reconstruction.
Meanwhile, at Indiana, the Wright American Fiction
collection is putting up what will eventually be more than 3000 books of
American fiction, or nearly every significant novel published in the United
States between 1851 and 1875. About half of the collection is online at this
point, with the rest in preparation.
Both collections are listed in the Archives section
of this site, and eventually all of the qualifying books will be listed
individually in The Online Books Page indexes as well. Because of the large size
of these collections, we intend to implement automated methods to catalog these
collections, using facilities such as the Open Archives Initiative to collect
records, rather than relying on the slower manual indexing we've done to date
for other sites.
Setting up the appropriate automation is a bit complicated, and requires some
upgrades of our system, so you might not see the start of large-scale listings
from these collections for a while yet. However, these upgrades should allow us
to finish listing these collections much faster than we otherwise
could.
Also, we may be adding small parts of these collections to our listings as
readers request. If you ask me whether a particular book from the 19th century
is online, or if it could be put online, I do check these collections, and list
their copy of the book if I find it there. Additionally, if there are particular
titles from either collection that you'd especially like to see listed here, let
me know the individual titles and URLs, and I'll do my best to get them listed
individually as soon as I can manage, even before the rest of the collection is
bulk-loaded.
Thank you for your patience, and I hope you enjoy the collections, and the
other online books we list here!
John Mark Ockerbloom, Editor
January 19, 2001The American
Library Association has announced that it will take legal
action to fight new US laws that require libraries to censor the Internet or
lose eligibility for federal funds.
Passed in the last days of Congress as riders to an appropriations bill, two
titles make eligibility for subsidized Internet access (paid for by taxes on
American's phone bills), dependent on the installation of filters on all
publicly accessible library and school computers. Even computers used solely by
adults must be filtered, according to one of the new laws. Although the adult
filtering is only required to remove obscenity, most commercial filtering
programs now available censor far more information, including some of the
on-line books listed at this site.
The ACLU will also be
challenging the new laws. An earlier lawsuit against Loudon County,
Virginia, in which the maintainer of this site participated, successfully struck
down mandatory filtering in that county's libraries.
February 22, 2000We are pleased to
announce a new home at the University of Pennsylvania for the Celebration of
Women Writers. The new top-level URL of the site is http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/
If you have URLs pointing to the old site at CMU, you can convert them to the
new URLs simply by replacing whatever came before "women" with
"http://digital.library.upenn.edu/". We will be phasing out the old URLs over
time.
As with The On-Line Books Page, the new site should provide new opportunities
for the Celebration to expand its offerings, both in the texts it offers and the
browsing and searching options available. We hope that the on-line texts will be
useful for teaching and reading at Penn and elsewhere. As always, all of the
Celebration's editions are free to all readers on-line.
For more information on the project, and how you can help out, see the
Celebration's main page.
October 6, 1999Sometime in the last year,
by my estimate, the 10,000th book went on-line. Last night, we got far enough
caught up to add the 10,000th title to The On-Line Books Page index. (There are
many more books besides, including thousands of titles in languages other than
English.) On-line books continue to be added at the Net at what appears to be
exponential growth. And I'm very happy and proud for the whole on-line book
community.
(For the full post I made after we hit this milestone, see this
post to the Book People list.)
I hope you enjoy this ever-growing resource. And I hope you'll help spread
even more knowledge throughout the world in the years to come.
John Mark Ockerbloom, Editor
August 1, 1999Welcome to the new home
for the On-Line Books Page. This Web site, and its editor, have moved to the University of Pennsylvania's Digital Library.
I'll be working here to research, plan, and develop digital library resources
and technology, to benefit readers both at Penn and throughout the Internet.
At present, the site looks almost exactly the way it did at Carnegie Mellon.
It will continue to provide an index of freely readable on-line books for the
whole Internet. You should also see an increase in the rate that books are
added, after the mostly dry spell in June and July while I was mostly off-Net.
(There will, however, probably be another break when I go traveling in
mid-August.) In the months and years to follow, we hope to enhance the site and
its listings, integrate the listings here with the increasing resources of
Penn's Digital Library, and experiment with new ways of finding and presenting
books on-line. Because the site is likely to be revised over time, especially in
the first few months here, I cannot at this time guarantee the persistence of
URLs below the main page. The new main URL for the On-Line Books Page, http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/
should be stable, though, so I recommend making links and bookmarks to that URL.

I'm quite happy to have worked and studied with some wonderful people at
Carnegie Mellon. Some of the resources related to the On-Line Books Page (such
as the feedback address for this site, the Book People mailing list, and the
Celebration of Women Writers) are still at CMU, but will be moving to new
addresses shortly. Updates to those addresses will soon appear on this site.
Other work on digital libraries continues at Carnegie Mellon; see the Universal Library Project there for what some of
my colleagues are developing there.
I'm very excited about researching and developing digital libraries at Penn.
I'm also very grateful for the support of the whole Internet community in
building up this resource. I hope that you'll visit this site often and check
out the new and old books, and be involved in
supporting it. I'd especially like to hear your feedback and suggestions as this
site evolves here at Penn.
John Mark Ockerbloom, Editor
January 12, 1999Today Eldritch Press filed a lawsuit in
federal court to stop the enforcement of the recent Sonny Bono Copyright Term
Extension Act in the United States, claiming it violates the US Constitution.
The act, passed last October, effectively froze the public domain in the United
States for 20 years for published materials.
Eldritch Press, run by Eric Eldred, was represented by the Berkman Foundation
and the law firm Hale and Dorr, including Harvard law school professors Larry
Lessig and Charles Nesson. Their argument is that the pattern of copyright
extensions, especially when given to works already published, does not conform
to the authority the Constitution gives to Congress for copyrights, namely
"promot[ing] the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited
Times... the exclusive Right to... Writings and Discoveries".
For more information on the suit, see the complaint and the press release from
Eldritch Press. More information about the case, and an opportunity to join a
coalition in support of it, will appear at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/eldredvreno/.

If the courts rule in favor of the plaintiffs, all works from 1923, will
enter the public domain in the United States, and the public domain would
continue to grow further every year. This will make many more books available
for free on-line (and off-line) use.
If the development of the lawsuit warrants it, the On-Line Books Page may
adjust its listing policy appropriately. At present, until the court takes
action, the listing policy of the On-Line Books Page remains the same. (That is,
we will only list 1923 works on US sites whose copyright expired early, that are
on-line with the permission of the presumed copyright holder, or that are
on-line in accordance with the "Libraries and Archives" exemption for certain
out-of-print works.) As usual, watch this space, or the Book People mailing
list, for the latest developments.
John Mark Ockerbloom, Editor
Update: (July 30): More parties have gotten involved in the
case on both sides. You can see the latest filings by both sides at this site. You might also
find the related Copyright's Commons site,
and OpenLaw of interest. The
latter site is experimenting with crafting legal arguments in public forums.
Interested parties are invited to participate.
January 6, 1999Two sheet music projects
have now placed over 25,000 pieces of sheet music from the 19th and early 20th
century on-line.
The Library of Congress' Music for the Nation
is a comprehensive exhibit of sheet music for 22,000 compositions registered for
copyright between 1870 and 1879. (By late this year, they plan to advance to
1885, adding another 23,000 titles.)
Duke's Historic
American Sheet Music has over 3,000 pieces covering the time period from
1850-1920.
I link to both collections from my Archives page,
though I have no plans to list individual sheet music titles at this time. It's
exciting to see large, comprehensive collections like these appearing for
certain media, and I'm hopeful that the time is coming soon when there will be
tens of thousands of text-based titles coming on-line every year as well. Watch
this space, or the Book People mailing
list, for the latest developments.
January 5, 1999The new year brought
a new year's worth of public domain books to most countries outside the United
States. In Canada, and other countries following the basic Berne Convention,
books by authors who died in 1948 are now in the public domain. In the UK and
other European Union countries, most of which actually rolled back the public
domain a few years back, books by authors who died in 1928 have returned to the
public domain.
In the United States, while the recently passed copyright extension bill
prevented remaining 1923 copyrights from expiring this year, we are still trying
to provide information that will allow people to put obscure works from 1923
on-line for the first time this year. Our Catalog of Copyright Entries
Page now has all the renewal records for books published in 1923. Also, a
provision in the Copyright Extension bill allows libraries and archives to
distribute out of print copyrighted works in their last 20 years of copyright
(under certain conditions). This provision has now gone into effect for
copyrighted works from 1923, as of January 1. The Copyright Office now has a Web page describing
the new law and their interim regulations. As time passes, we hope to provide
more information at this site as well.
John Mark Ockerbloom, Editor
October 28, 1998The copyright extension
bill mentioned in the October 9 news item is now law, having been signed by
President Clinton on October 27. This will prevent books published in 1923 and
later that are not already in the public domain from entering the public domain
in the United States for at least 20 years.
I have started a page to
provide access to copyright renewal records, which eventually should make it
easier to find books published after 1922 that have entered the public domain
due to nonrenewal. I welcome contributions of additional records, in page image,
text, or HTML format.
Although the bill has become law, I would encourage readers to speak loudly
in support of the public domain. Congressional testimony indicates that some in
the entertainment industry favor even longer copyright periods,
effectively preventing anything further from ever entering the public domain.
Your voice is needed to help stop this from happening.
John Mark Ockerbloom, Editor
October 9, 1998I regret to have to
pass on the news that as of Wednesday evening, both the US House of
Representatives and the Senate passed legislation to extend existing copyrights
an additional 20 years. President Clinton has previously expressed support for
copyright extension, so a veto is highly unlikely, despite the musical licensing
riders that were attached to the bill. You can still send your letters to the
President, but I expect that the bill will most likely become law sometime in
the next few days.
This bill does not re-copyright any works that are already in the
public domain. However, it extends nearly all US copyrights that are still in
force for another 20 years.
For more information on the bill, and what can be done now, see my
post to the Book People mailing list.
John Mark Ockerbloom, Editor
September 21, 1998The Build-A-Book
Project, sponsored by the Celebration of Women
Writers, is back for a second season. Last year, scores of Build-A-Book
volunteers collaborated on putting 19
books on-line, on a variety of topics.
Three books are currently in the works, with more planned through the spring.
If you've been interested in getting involved in putting books on-line, the
Build-A-Book project can be a useful introduction on learning how to do it
without having to commit to a whole book right away. To participate, see the
instructions on this page.

June 1, 1998Along with books, The
On-Line Books Page is now also listing particularly significant archives of
major serials: namely, permanent, freely accessible archives of magazines,
journals, and newspapers covering listing major archives of serials (such as
magazines, published journals, and newspapers).
Serials can be at least as important as books in library research. Serials
are often the first places that new research and scholarship appear. They are
sources for firsthand accounts of contemporary events and commentary, They are
also often the first (and sometimes the only) place that quality literature
appears.
The On-Line Books Page will list major serial archives in much the same way
as it lists ordinary books. They appear in the title, subject, and new items
listings intermingled with books. They also have listing
criteria similar to the listing criteria used for books.
The first listings will appear on June 1, and continue to grow over time.
Please let me know of serial archives meeting my criteria that I should be
listing. I hope readers find them useful!
John Mark Ockerbloom, Editor
April 7, 1998The US House of
Representatives has passed a bill that would extend all copyrights now in force
for an additional 20 years. If the bill became law, older books not already in
the public domain would not enter the public domain until 95 years after they
were first published.
Now the bill just has to clear the Senate to be sent to the President, who is
expected to sign the bill into law if it is sent to him. According to a
telephone interview with Troy Dow, the Senate does not plan to hold hearings for
this bill, and is expected to vote on it this spring. Unless Senators hear
objections from their constituents, it is likely that no further copyrights will
expire into the public domain in the United States until at least 2019. Not only
would this hurt the availability of free on-line books and other free uses of
literature, but it would also hinder the creation of new works from old
material.
If you do not want this bill to pass, contact your
Senators now. For more information on this bill and other issues, see our free press
section.
Update: I have recently learned that the copyright extension bill passed by
the House included an additional section that would allow bar and restaurant
owners to play the radio or TV without paying royalties. This additional section
is strongly opposed by ASCAP and other lobbying groups, and might be enough to
stop the bill this year. But the fate of copyright extension this year (and in
future years) is still uncertain, so contact your senators to make your voice
heard as well.
March 27, 1998It's appropriate that
Women's History Month should be the time a new milestone is set for the Celebration of Women
Writers. This month, we listed the 1000th on-line title that a woman wrote,
edited, translated, illustrated, or otherwise contributed to.
Women wrote a large number of books, on a wide variety of topics, throughout
history, but their contributions are all too often forgotten. While books by
women remain in the minority of books on-line, the Celebration is working both
to get more books on-line, and raise awareness of the contributions made by
women writers. Along with the book links, the Celebration has well over 2000
links to pages with biographical material on women writers, and can be browsed
by author, by country, and by time period. You're invited to take part in this
project. See Getting
Involved for details.
January 5, 1998Thanks to a
Congressional recess, consideration of a new US copyright extension bill was put
off until 1998. That meant that another year's worth of copyrights went into the
public domain on schedule on New Year's Day. As of 1998, copyrights for works
published in 1922 have expired in the United States.
Works also went into the public domain in most other countries. In the
European Union, where a retroactive copyright extension law re-copyrighted 20
years worth of public domain works a couple of years back, works by authors who
died in 1927 rejoined the public domain. In most of the rest of the world, works
by authors who died in 1947 entered the public domain.
A few 1922 works (and some other works) have been added to the On-Line Books
Page listings today. More will follow when I return in mid-January.
My thanks to those who wrote asking Congress not to rush copyright extension
bills through. Congress reconvenes this month, and the House Judiciary Committee
is still considering the copyright extension bills, and could schedule hearings
at any time. If you would like to encourage Congress not to extend copyright
terms to unreasonable lengths, now is the time to write. See pages by Dennis Karjala and Dennis McCarthy for
more information.
John Mark Ockerbloom, Editor
December 12, 1997The Build-A-Book
Project has released its first title, Dorothy Canfield Fisher's Understood
Betsy. The book was typed, scanned in, and proofread by a dozen volunteers,
all working on different parts of the book.
The Build-A-Book
Project, sponsored by the Celebration of Women
Writers, lets people work collaboratively on putting books on-line. It can
be a useful introduction for people who are interested in helping put books
on-line, but don't feel ready to handle an entire book on their own.
Several other books are in the works. If you would like to participate, see this
page. If you'd like to work on a chapter over the holidays, please be sure
your email reaches us by December 20.
October 21, 1997Two bills have been
recently introduced in Congress that would seriously weaken the public domain,
the source of the majority of the books now available on-line free of charge.
Both appear to be placed on a "fast track", so stopping them will require rapid
action.
The first is a revision to the copyright law that would extend all copyrights
now in force for an additional 20 years (long past the lifetimes of the authors
that copyright was designed to encourage). This would keep older works out of
the public domain for nearly a century after publication. Copyright extension
bills have been proposed for the last couple of years, and have generally not
gotten past the subcommittee hearings stage. However, this one has apparently
already passed through the subcommittee without hearing, and is now in front of
the full House Judiciary Committee, with a nearly identical bill now in the
Senate as well. For full information on the bill, why it's harmful, and what can
be done to stop it, see Professor Dennis Karjala's Opposing Copyright Extension
page.
The second bill is a "database protection bill" being pushed by a few big
database companies to put certain public domain materials under intellectual
property controls. Unlike the bill above, which would simply freeze the public
domain for at least 20 years, this would effectively remove material
already belonging to the public from the public domain. It would take away a
right that the public has had up till this time to freely use factual
information. This too could seriously hurt the dissemination of knowledge. A
critical report on the bill, including the full text, can be found in this
Hyperlaw report.
For more information about what you can do to help the free electronic press,
see our new free
press page.
October 10, 1997I've been working on
redesigning and extending the Celebration of Women Writers pages for several
months now, during which time there haven't been any updates to the site. Well,
the new version is finally up and running, and I hope you'll check it out! The
name and location of the top-level file are the same [...]
The listing was already large, and one of the things I wanted to do was to
substantially *extend* the authors, so the new site provides separate author
pages for each letter of the ALPHABET.
Another new feature is listings by COUNTRY. There are particularly good
resources for Mexico and Israel, where government-sponsored sites are listing
authors, and for African writers (these are listed in their individual
countries.) I'm still working on indexing resources from some other large sites,
so lots of new links will continue to appear in the next couple of weeks.
When we have time, in a month or two, we intend to provide search as well as
browse capabilities, to generate listings using names, dates, & country.
Obviously, in a reimplementation and expansion like this, errors are likely
to have crept in, so if you find incorrect information, or bad links, please
send me information!
We also hope you'll get involved in a new project we're starting to
collaboratively build on-line books. So do consider reading the Get Involved
section! I may post in more detail about this next week, but for now, I'll let
you go and explore the new pages! We're very excited about them, and hope you'll
enjoy them!
Best wishes,Mary Mark Ockerbloom(Editor, A Celebration of Women
Writers)
October 1, 1997Giving away on-line
books is good for the bottom line. That's what some on-line publishers are now
saying, in
the Washington Post (September 30), and in the Chronicle of Higher Education
(September 12, summarized in
Edupage). National Academy Press, for instance, has so far put over 1700 of
its books on-line, and reports sales boosts of up to 2 or 3 times previous
levels for some titles. MIT Press reports similar results. Publishers cite the
exposure available on the Web as "great advertising" for the books, attracting
readers who ordinarily would not have bought or even heard of the books. Readers
may browse the book on-line, but if they want to read the whole thing, most
prefer print, say the publishers. So, many of them hit the online "order"
button, or dial the phone number provided on the Web pages to order a print
copy. The result? The best of both worlds: more books available on-line,
and more sales. Or, as Calvin Reid of Publishers Weekly put it in the
Post, "Posting books online invariably leads the reader back to print."
September 4, 1997More and more books
are being made available on the Net, as the on-line library of the Internet
starts to approach the size and scale of many physical libraries. We indexed our
5000th title on Monday, and the influx of titles on all subjects shows no signs
of letting up any time soon.
A large portion of the on-line books on the Net have been prepared by Project
Gutenberg, the oldest and one of the best-known electronic text projects going.
They've just posted their 1000th etext today. Their goal is to make 10,000 texts
freely available worldwide in common, easily downloadable formats by the year
2001. They're always welcoming volunteers and donations; write [e-mail] if
you'd like to join their effort.
August 25, 1997Over the last couple of
weeks, and continuing into September, we're listing the extensive Making of
America collection from the University of Michigan Digital Library. This
collection includes page images for over 1000 books from the latter part of the
19th century in the US. Some of the titles are familiar, but many more are
comparatively rare and previously inaccessible without access to major research
libraries.
The collection lets readers view 19th-century America as seen by the people
who lived there. Major issues and controversies of the day are well-represented,
such as slavery and secession, westward expansion, religious controversies,
women's rights, immigration, and political campaigns. Readers will also find
works of poetry, economics, science, education, etiquette, and regional
information. Authors include well-known authors like Harriet Beecher Stowe,
Frederick Douglass, and Horace Greeley; celebrities of the day like P. T.
Barnum, Buffalo Bill, and General Custer; as well as many other writers who
helped shape culture in their time.
Because of the large volume of the collection, we'll be indexing the Making
of America books and books from other sources on separate days. This should help
people looking through the new books listing find what they want more easily.
John Mark Ockerbloom, Editor
July 20, 1997Welcome to the redesigned
On-Line Books Page. Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be phasing in new
versions of the On-Line Books Page and sub-pages, to make the site more useful
to readers.
I'm stressing these qualities in the redesign:

Ease of use: Fast loading, intuitive layout and navigation, and (still)
remaining accessible to all Web browers, old and new, graphical or
non-graphical.
Improved search facilities, suitable for our expanded index (4000
individual title listings, as of this weekend). Now you can search books
on-line by author and title simultaneously, and do some prefix searching as
well as whole-word search. More about this soon.
More information about the project, and what you can do to participate in
building the new libraries of the Internet. (I've still got a way to go in
filling in this material; look for more in the weeks to come.) There's
still more to come, like redesigns and renovations of some of our special
features areas. More details as these come closer to appearing on-line.
As with any construction project, there will be some dust and detours as
things are broken in, and as we see how well the new features work out. If you
have comments or suggestions about the new design, or want to help, I'd love to
hear from you! Write [e-mail].
Happy reading!
John Mark Ockerbloom, Editor


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