
Digitized Books from 1923 Now Available at the Internet Archive - ingve
http://www.openculture.com/2019/01/11000-digitized-books-from-1923-are-now-available-online-at-the-internet-archive.html
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edward
The Internet Archive is amazing!

They accept donations:
[https://archive.org/donate/](https://archive.org/donate/)

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fernly
Here's an odd thing: browsing the fiction books with date:1923 I saw a
familiar title, "Seven Days in May" by Knebel and Bailey[1] -- a story
definitely written well after that year, since it opens at the Pentagon, a
building only opened in 1943.

In fact, per Wikipedia[2] it was published in 1964.

Yet if you open the IA copy[1] at the linked page you will see "First
published 1923".

WTF?

Heck, here's another: The Doomsday Men by J.B. Priestly[3], "First published
1923" but in fact[4] in 1937.

[1]
[https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.124792/page/n1...](https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.124792/page/n11)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Days_in_May_(novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Days_in_May_\(novel\))

[3]
[https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.148207/page/n5](https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.148207/page/n5)

[4]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._B._Priestley#Novels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._B._Priestley#Novels)

~~~
hinkley
Since this is a sliding window it might be worth looking at the entire middle
and late 20's. Cribbed from a top 50 list, I see works by F Scott Fitzgerald,
Hemingway, Agatha Christie, Virginia Woolf, DH Lawrence, Dorothy Parker,
Gertrude Stein, Frank Kafka, PG Wodehouse, Aldous Huxley, ee cummings, Pablo
Neruda, AA Milne, Sinclair Lewis, Faulkner, Hesse...

Man the Roaring 20's had a shitload of authors...

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sneakernets
There are still many, many 18th century American cookbooks that haven't been
digitized yet. Some have probably been lost given their proximity to kitchens,
which were separate from the house, more prone to weather and, perhaps, fire.
I can only find references in old catalogues that they _existed_ , but nothing
much else.

~~~
csours
I don't know how to ask this question, but how useful is a cookbook from the
18th century (or even the early 20th century)? The ingredients are likely
called something else, or may be unavailable.

~~~
DanAndersen
You're correct that there's often a lot of interpretation and historical
research that has to be done when looking through such cookbooks. However,
they can offer quite an interesting glimpse into another era. Specifically,
I'd recommend watching some of the Townsends "18th Century Cooking" YouTube
videos [0] which show how some unusual (or familiar!) recipes from colonial
America may have been made.

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/user/jastownsendandson](https://www.youtube.com/user/jastownsendandson)

~~~
sneakernets
That is one of the best channels on YouTube, and I know a few teachers who
used some of his videos in their lesson plans.

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veridies
While I love the Internet Archive, their search can be a bit of a mess. They
often have several copies of the same work in varying qualities, with no easy
way to find the best one, they have somewhat inconsistent standards in
tagging, and they frequently have copyright-encumbered works inadvertently
available. As people mentioned below Project Gutenberg is excellent for
finding public domain books, but there seems to be no way to search for and
watch most public domain films in a reasonable quality – or even high
definition. Is anyone trying to fix that?

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userbinator
I'm pretty sure I've downloaded (non-fiction) books newer than 1923 from the
IA before --- in fact I just checked one and it's from 1953. Is it just
because those are not actually public domain, and no one has bothered to issue
a takedown notice for them (yet)?

~~~
davvolun
What's the book?

There's lots of reasons why a work after 1923 might be in the public domain,
but as of this year, _everything_ before 1923 is in the public domain. I would
guess FOSS/FLOSS software is probably the most likely thing people might
recognize as "public domain-like" (due to the issue of taking something public
domain, then copyrighting your original work on it e.g. Disney's erstwhile
business model).

Copyright could have been abandoned, creator hasn't pursued their claim, it
could have been specifically released by the creator, "copyleft", ...

~~~
userbinator
This one, for example:

[https://archive.org/details/Engineering_Electronics_George_H...](https://archive.org/details/Engineering_Electronics_George_Happell_Wilfred_Hesselberth_1953)

It's probably the first two of your guesses, or the pre-1964 reason mentioned
in a sibling comment. (There's stuff newer than that on the IA too, which are
likely to be there because of the reasons originally mentioned.)

~~~
davvolun
Looks like there's a lot of McGraw-Hill Book Company (now McGraw-Hill
Education, not sure if that has something to do with it) books on archive.org,
particularly from the "Public Library of India." I'm wondering if these came
through some digitization effort that slipped through copyright, or maybe the
original digitizer had obtained specific permission for these volumes?
Definitely not obvious to me.

[https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22McGraw-
Hil...](https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22McGraw-
Hill+Book+Company%22&page=2)

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robotbikes
I think the Prophet by Kahil Gibran is considered one of the classics just
entering the public domain. I also found the Prospects of Industrial
Civilization by Dora and Bertrand Russel to be interesting. In looking at the
plain text though I was annoyed at how error ridden the OCR job was. I think
it will be interesting to see how much of the 1923 work is added to a site
like Project Gutenburg as AABBY FineReader 11.0 leaves a bit to be desired
based upon the published results on archive.org

~~~
toomuchtodo
If interested, you can contribute to the process:
[https://www.pgdp.net/c/](https://www.pgdp.net/c/)

~~~
zozbot123
The bottleneck at PGDP these days is not actually proofreading texts or even
marking them up, but "post-processing" them - going from a bunch of proofread
and marked-up page texts (and the original page images) to a complete HTML
edition, ready for posting at Project Gutenberg. Many projects run aground at
this stage, because they have relatively few contributors for that sort of
work. So, if you really want to help (and have relevant skills), you should
ask about taking over some old projects that are stuck in that state.

~~~
fernly
All of PGDP is fun and satisfying volunteer work if you like reading, but the
Post-Processing stage was for me, the most fun of all. However, in order to
qualify as a PPer you must first put in a rather lengthy apprenticeship
working in the different levels of proofing.

PGDP FAQ:
[https://www.pgdp.net/wiki/DP_Official_Documentation:General/...](https://www.pgdp.net/wiki/DP_Official_Documentation:General/FAQ_Central)

PGDP Post-Processing FAQ:
[https://www.pgdp.net/wiki/DP_Official_Documentation:PP_and_P...](https://www.pgdp.net/wiki/DP_Official_Documentation:PP_and_PPV/Post-
Processing_FAQ)

> On its journey through multiple proofreading and formatting rounds, the text
> may have been worked on by hundreds of volunteers. Post-processors must
> standardize the formatting of the book and adjust it to comply with Project
> Gutenberg's requirements. They must also deal with any detectable mistakes
> or inconsistencies that have survived all proofreading and formatting
> rounds.

> The ultimate goal of post-processing is to create a consistently formatted
> etext, that contains as few errors as possible and that accurately reflects
> the intentions of the author.

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klodolph
I don’t know how I should feel about this but I don’t recognize many books
published in 1923. I was looking to see what classics I could easily add to my
Kindle but the list doesn’t seem as recognizable as 1922 or 1924. Some of the
things I recognize from 1923 are parts of series (Poirot, Jeeves & Wooster)
rather than stand-alone books.

Can anyone recommend something from 1923?

~~~
hinkley
This is the argument I've heard from Fine Arts people on the subject of the
written word:

You won't have heard of any of those books from '23\. Your English teacher
picked books that they could get for next to nothing for a roomful of students
(eg, public domain "classics"), or suck it up and fight for their absolute
favorite book of all time.

So you're mostly going to hear of really old books in class, and really modern
books from media and friends, and between that maybe the best 50 books from
the last 50 years from proper literary mavens.

By moving the public domain forward in time you start opening up the
opportunity for kids to hear about books from the 20's and 30's, things that
might tie into History class (the Depression, the leadup to WWII) and thus
into other aspects of life (civics, poli-sci, etc).

So your kids will know of books from the 20's, their kids books from the 40's
(Tolkien), and so on. And your great great grandchild will encounter Harry
Potter for the first time in the 7th grade.

~~~
ghaff
I'm not sure. I admittedly didn't go to a public school but we definitely had
in-copyright books from John Hersey, Pearl Buck, James Hilton, Evelyn Waugh,
John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway. Maybe that qualifies as "maybe the best 50
books from the last 50 years from proper literary mavens" but, in general, I'm
not sure that out-of-copyright was overrepresented for any reason but that
they were Western canon. (And, in many cases, not very readable by high-
schoolers.)

I'm all for shorter copyright terms of course.

~~~
hinkley
There were certainly classes where we had paperbacks, but you don't spend an
entire semester going over one book. I think other than electives and higher
education, I rarely saw more than one paperback per semester, and a few of
those were mandated by the state board of education (eg, Animal Farm).

In the earliest book-heavy class I can recall, probably senior year of high
school, we read a bunch of Edgar Allen Poe out of the textbook (Poe is out of
copyright). There were book reports, but that was one copy per student and I
think more than a few of us checked books out of the library for this.

I think Gatsby was the only book we had to buy that year. _That_ book is from
1925, and should have been out of copyright decades ago. So that everyone
could suffer^W enjoy it for free.

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jcoffland
Re: copyright, “We have shortchanged a generation,” - Brewster Kahle Internet
Archive founder

A powerful statement! I love the Internet Archive. It gives me hope for
humanity.

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renholder
Looks like a non-GDPR-friendly site?

 _Forbidden_

 _You don 't have permission to access /2019/01/11000-digitized-books-
from-1923-are-now-available-online-at-the-internet-archive.html on this
server._

Same with the site's root.

 _Forbidden_

 _You don 't have permission to access / on this server._

Anyone have a mirror of it handy?

~~~
nathcd
Coincidentally, it looks to be available via the Wayback Machine:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20190107210010/http://www.opencu...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190107210010/http://www.openculture.com/2019/01/11000-digitized-
books-from-1923-are-now-available-online-at-the-internet-archive.html)

