Forgotten Vintage Children's Lit We Want Republished! discussion

So my motivation in starting this group is to bring hidden books back into the light, to make them accessible to as many readers as possible, however that can happen. If a publisher picks up the rights and reprints/rereleases it, GREAT! If it becomes freely available to everyone on Project Gutenberg, or OpenLibrary, or Archive.org, EVEN BETTER!

Either way, we want access to these books!

Project Gutenberg is my personal favourite.
https://www.gutenberg.org/
You don't need an account, you don't need to sign up, and there are thousands of books available. Most are antique (lapsed copyrights), but that doesn't make them unworthy. There's a Listopia list highlighting some of the popular favourites:

Project Gutenberg Books: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/1...

And I also added a bunch to this list, too:
Free eBooks Collection: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/1...

OpenLibrary is another popular choice, but one I personally have yet to register for (mañana, mañana!): https://openlibrary.org/
This website is allegedly facing lawsuits from big guys like HarperCollins, Penguin, etc., which I find upsetting and disappointing (for shame - attacking public libraries!!!!)

Archive.org is another, which has come to the rescue of many a searcher on What's the Name of That Book?! ( https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/185 ). It's another free account sort of deal: https://archive.org/

LibriVox is among my favourites, and I have enjoyed several of H P Lovecraft's books as read by volunteers on this site (NB: those aren't children's stories, but I'm sure many teens would enjoy them regardless). If you enjoy the sound of your own voice, or just want to do a good turn, they're always looking for volunteers to record books in the public domain. https://librivox.org/

If you know of any excellent works of vintage juvenile literature that are available for free (preferrably from non-dodgy websites!), please do share them! :) Thanks very kindly!

If you know of another good resource, please discuss that here, too.

You must register for Open Library/Internet Archive. :) OL is better for organising 'want to reads' into lists but also, contrary to what you would think, the two sites don't necessarily have the same books available for borrowing. Also, I know you're not in Canada but Faded Page is a useful site for books in the Canadian public domain. How you feel about using it elsewhere is...up to you.

I was not aware of Faded Page - I'll check it out! Wonderful - thank you!

Of the resources you have listed, Capn, I use the Internet Archive the most, although I have read ebooks through Project Gutenberg as well. I tend not to like the transcribed editions, preferring scanned editions, which let you read the actual type from the original book. I have never used OpenLibrary or Librivox.

Some sources not yet listed:

Google Books (https://books.google.com/)

I have found some very old titles through Google Books, that have not been available through sources like the Internet Archive. They are a better source, I think, the older the texts get. I have better luck with them, when it comes to books from the early 19th-century, 18th-century, and before.

The Hathi Trust (https://www.hathitrust.org/)

A repository of scanned materials from research libraries. Their content is similar to The Internet Archive, but they sometimes have titles I can't find at IA.

The Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature (https://ufdc.ufl.edu/collections/juv)

A selection of digitized editions from the more than 115,000 books in the University of Florida's George A. Smathers Libraries. Their juvenile collection focuses on "volumes published in the United States and Great Britain from the mid-1600s to present day."

The Library of Congress Digital Collections (https://www.loc.gov/collections/)

I have not spent a great deal of time digging in here, so I am not sure if all of their digitized children's and juvenile books are somehow searchable. But I have found scans of rarer books here, some of which also appear on the Internet Archive, and some of which don't.

Trove (https://trove.nla.gov.au/)

The digital collection / project of the National Library of Australia. I have not used this site extensively, and am not well-versed in how to navigate it, or search it. But I have found specific books I have gone looking for—vintage Australian books—on it. One example would be Nellie Doran: A Story of Australian Home and School Life, which can be downloaded and/or read here: https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-24357566/view.

Oh boy, Abigail! Such great tips! Thanks so much for these!

As an update, I'm using Archive.org and OpenLibrary all the time now. I'm making monetary donations, too - think it's absolutely rotten that the publishers are trying to shut them down.

I'm not sure I was aware that one could read books on GoogleBooks! That's a handy tip indeed! Now to check out Hathi trust...!

As Abigail has pointed out, some corporate greed has threatened the very existence of Archive.org, Internet Archive and Open Library.

See discussion here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

I personally think it's a bloody shame and more evidence that we've let corporations get too powerful, but what can you do at this juncture? Not much....

And because of such, I suddenly have no compunction in saving .pdfs of available books that I cannot locate or afford. There's sneaky ways to do this, and Google can help provide that info.

But honestly... read what you can, save what you will.

Dreadful stuff.

(There are other alternatives that are not based in the USA and where legal precedence may not reach - https://annas-archive.org/ for example, though it doesn't hold the material).

Still - get a hold of the material you need NOW is excellent advice.

Capn wrote: "As Abigail has pointed out, some corporate greed has threatened the very existence of Archive.org, Internet Archive and Open Library.

See discussion here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/225..."

Going after IA will make no difference to the ways in which most people who want them access expensive academic books, textbooks, and scientific journals. As far as compunction is concerned, I have none. Re: Anna's Archive - one of the 'shadow libraries' listed was taken down by the feds last fall so the search results may not be accurate.

Oh, I thought Anna's Archive was in Serbia and beyond their jurisdiction! :(

Well there goes my last shred of hope...

Capn wrote: "Oh, I thought Anna's Archive was in Serbia and beyond their jurisdiction! :(

Well there goes my last shred of hope..."

Anna's might be but Z Library, which had servers in several countries, was taken down last fall and the operators extradited to the US from Argentina. The database, or part of it, was archived. LibGen is blocked in some countries but continues to operate. SciHub also. Although LibGen and Z were said to be front ends of the same database that wasn't quite the case, in the same way that OL and IA are not exactly the same. I haven't searched on Anna's (which sprung up in the wake of the Z Lib takedown) but if it gives results for Z they might have to be accessed through TOR or by some other means. Or so the collective wisdom of Reddit says. That's where I go to sate my curiosity.

:O

Wow, there's a whole world out there that I have absolutely no idea about, clearly! XD

Capn wrote: ":O

Wow, there's a whole world out there that I have absolutely no idea about, clearly! XD"
A whole illegal world. ;)

Disney is now suing Sem for copyright infringement. It's not the "A Whole New World" song from their little flick Aladdin that's the problem. It's the fact that, in the grand tradition of Alexander, Lex Luthor, and Pinky and the Brain, they are laying claim to The Whole World. Everything. All bow down to The Mouse!

(And just remember that they are largely to blame for the absurd copyright terms that are keeping the public domain out of the hands of the public. https://artrepreneur.com/journal/disn... )

Michael wrote: "Disney is now suing Sem for copyright infringement. It's not the "A Whole New World" song from their little flick Aladdin that's the problem. It's the fact that, in the grand tradition of Alexander..."
It's been all downhill since Walt. ;) I'm absolutely certain that I've never infringed their copyright.

Capn wrote: "As Abigail has pointed out, some corporate greed has threatened the very existence of Archive.org, Internet Archive and Open Library.

See discussion here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/225..."
If you're on Twitter you could take a look at Library Futures. They tweeted the link to this article a few days ago.

https://www.thenation.com/article/cul...

Sem wrote: "Capn wrote: "As Abigail has pointed out, some corporate greed has threatened the very existence of Archive.org, Internet Archive and Open Library.

See discussion here: https://www.goodreads.com/t..."

That was an interesting article. I'm not sure I totally agree that the weaponization of copyright is as late as the 1970s, seeing as there are some pretty strongly-worded restrictions about reuse and lending of the vintage 1960s paperbacks I own. XD I think publishers have always been trying to force more sales and prevent resale and distribution and seemed to think their copyright entitled them to it even back then.

But I agree with the basic idea that this is a step too far. I felt the same about Napster - if the music was more than say 5 years old, then it had been pirated and copied a million times since then. And people generally don't get that excited about old songs... what you race to buy is NEW content.

If they just put a moratorium on digital editions for a time following initial release, surely that would prevent 'losses' in potential sales...

I mean, I rarely read new books, knowing that in 3 to 4 years, the secondhand market will be flooded with copies of that book and I can get it for practically nothing.

The only books I do tend to buy new are:

- new books from INDIE PUBLISHERS that are only going to get more scarce with time, and
- luxury editions of classics

Also, I can't stress this enough - in spite of being a 'millenial', I HATE reading off screens, eReaders included. I don't read eBooks unless I really have to, i.e. I can't find or afford the book in paperback or hardcover.

If you take a casual look that what 'most' people read (which appears to be Paranormal Fantasy - not my thing), those readers are constantly referring to "Kindle Unlimited Content" and "Wattpad" stories online - they're going for cheap/free when they can anyway.

If publishers want to SELL more books, they should focus on producing high quality, long-lasting editions which are COLOURED AND STYLED TO SUIT CURRENT INTERIOR DESIGN TRENDS. That's a market right there - there are people who will buy sets of books for the aesthetic value and never read them. And seeing as Pantone comes out with a colour of the year (or more... heh), you can bet on folks buying new sets every few years or so anyway. (Lego recently partnered with IKEA - surely Hachette/Penguin would team up with a Hygge-inspired collection that perfectly fit whichever new furniture IKEA was releasing, in the same palette..)

Too much fast-profit, easy-profit stuff going on. It's wasteful, and it's ugly. >:p

More to the point - GOLD FOILED FILIGREE/DETAILS ON THE SPINES needs to come back. People literally buy stacks of colour-coordinated vintage books on Etsy because of how they look on the shelf (never to be read - some are even hollowed out between the covers! Horrifying!).

For example, these sellers:
https://www.etsy.com/shop/MyColorBaza...
https://www.etsy.com/shop/TheNavyButt...

If they just made pretty books you'd want to have displayed... Surely "Puffin in Bloom" sold mostly because of that? (Even I bought a set of the mini ones as a gift). https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/se...

(I think the IKEA idea is a potentially lucrative one. They could do classic cookbooks to fit their kitchen shelves, classic kids stories for their children's range (to fit their book display shelves in a colour-coordinated manner), bedtime reads for their bedside tables, etc.)

Capn wrote: "Sem wrote: "Capn wrote: "As Abigail has pointed out, some corporate greed has threatened the very existence of Archive.org, Internet Archive and Open Library.

See discussion here: https://www.goo..."

Some publishers don't issue books in digital format right away. Although hard copies could still be scanned and converted it's far less likely to happen to books that aren't best sellers and it won't happen immediately. There are so many ways to inveigle readers into making purchases. Heaven knows we're eager enough. :D

They're not short on money, no. Nor profits. It's just that greedy shareholders want more and more and more returns. It's Biblical in its scope, that greed. Unbelievable. :S

I wonder how long it will be before an attack is made on the sale of secondhand (used) books. These days I buy most of my books from charity (thrift) shops. What profit there is goes to the charity without a percentage to the publisher. That must annoy some of those shareholders and corporate executives.

Len wrote: "I wonder how long it will be before an attack is made on the sale of secondhand (used) books. These days I buy most of my books from charity (thrift) shops. What profit there is goes to the charity..."

I'm wondering about this, too. In particular the online resellers.. Naturally, I'm simply using this as an excuse to stock up now... XD