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stbalbach |
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May 31, 2011 11:32:50am |
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World's largest archive of PD scanned books? |
What is the world's largest depository of public domain scanned books?
As of mid-2011, Internet Archive has almost 3 million. This includes about 1 million books copied from Google Books. Google Books, from what I can tell, has about 1 million PD books, a number which has not increased much in the past 2 years or so.(*) I can't find any other repositories with comparable numbers.
Does this mean Internet Archive is the world's largest archive of free Public Domain books?
Even removing the 1 million Google Books from IA's library, it still has twice as many PD titles as Google.
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* - The 1-million number of PD Google Books is reported in some older blog posts and reportedly what Haithai Trust has, which mirrors Google. I'm not sure how to verify it directly since Google's website doesn't report how many books are in the PD, unless anyone has some other information.
This post was modified by stbalbach on 2011-05-31 18:32:50
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Jim Carlile |
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June 16, 2011 01:34:01am |
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Re: World's largest archive of PD scanned books? |
Definitely the Archive.
One reason is that the Archive will actively seek out post-1922 PD works to scan. Google does NOT.
In fact, despite a strict UC stipulation to make all of their California PD works available, Google abjectly refuses to research post-1922 copyrights to see if something's in the PD.
The reason is obvious. Someday Google wants to merchandise this holding bigtime-- like when libraries everywhere have replaced their own hardcopies with Google Books-- and so cutting down the number of fee-based, post-1922 books makes bad business sense. That's why I love the Archive.
BTW-- anyone else alarmed by how UC has replaced their old campuswide MELVYL system with an OCLC database?
By presenting access to outside holdings beyond California, they have license now to start tossing things out left and right on every campus. Which they will do.
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Poster:
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stbalbach |
Date:
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May 31, 2011 11:43:23am |
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Re: World's largest archive of PD scanned books? |
Hathi Trust is reporting 2,376,696 books in the public domain, close on IA's heels, though they also mirror books from IA and Google.
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