Every book in the world, online
Kevin Kelly has a comprehensive piece in The New York Times Magazine today about a variety of large-scale projects to scan and make available online as many printed books as possible. Most people have probably heard about Google’s book project, but that’s not the only one.
Of course this raises questions about copyright — and those questions can be downright tough to answer. Kelly writes:
The older, the more obscure the work, the less likely a publisher will be able to tell you (that is, if the publisher still exists) whether the copyright has reverted to the author, whether the author is alive or dead, whether the copyright has been sold to another company, whether the publisher still owns the copyright or whether it plans to resurrect or scan it.
(While skimming through this long article on my laptop in the Atlanta airport, I realized how really, really good the Times’s recent Web redesign is. The linespacing is truly fantastic — it makes the text quite legible, even though the Times stuck with a serif font!)
Technorati tags: books | copyright | libraries | online media
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