Copyright-free books for domain development

Domain development seems all the rage these days. Content creation often seems to be the stumbling block for domain owners. Here I want to cover another potential source to help with domain development.

Copyright-free books

Books copyrighted in the US before 1923 are now in the public domain; their copyrights have expired and it is legal to copy such works. This source of copyright free content for website development is a little more unusual and is not for everyone.There are a couple of ways I use this content which I will go through here.

Books copyrighted 1923-1963 are not automatically expired. These books are still protected by copyright law if renewed; check for renewal at Standford Copyright Renewal Database and the U Penn Catalog of Copyright Entries and the Library of Congress Copyright Database to cover the entire date range.

Google books

The easiest way to find these books is to use Google books. Go to the “advanced book search” option which is to the right of the “search books” button. Fill it out with your keyword and fill out the publication date as shown below for guaranteed copyright free books. In this case I am again using my BoneThinning.com example and searching for “bone”.

The search results will look like the following:

Clicking on the first result allows me to see the digitized pages:

Note that you can search the book by keyword in the upper right corner (arrow) and results are displayed below. Clicking on a page causes it to load in the left panel. Also you can see that there is a tool bar (arrow) that allows you to select text or pictures etc with some limited options on where to send it. I prefer to use a screen grab program to get what I want.

Here for example I could take the drawing of the bone and add it to my website. In fact I have done exactly that with a different drawing of a bone from Google Books on my BoneThinning.com website under Bone Structure.

A few words of caution

Since these books were written, terminology may have changed and information may have changed. Always make sure you check against a modern reference.

The language used in some of these books is quite stilted and out-dated. I suggest you rewrite the text rather than just copy it. Again you can use modern books to help you update the text.

The beauty of old drawings

Many of these books have beautiful drawings that can really enhance a web page. Many anatomy books from this time are almost considered works of art now. For example I will leave you with this hand drawing from The Birds of America by John James Audubon from 1840 which are now considered works of art.

Birds of America Havell Edition (1826-38) The 1st original Audubon publication. Some of the first 10 prints in the series were produced in Scotland by Lizars, and the remainder were produced in London by R. Havell and/or his son (Jr.). There were 435 different prints in this publication, and an estimated 180 complete sets of 435 were produced. Today, about 110 of these sets remain intact as bound book volumes owned by museums, institutions, and private individuals. The last recorded sale for a complete 4 volume bound set was $8.8 million. Individual prints sell for from several thousand dollars each up to $200,000.00 or more. These are the most widely and frequently reproduced and copied of all the original Audubon prints.