Re:What Ever Happened to Google Books?
by walterbell on Saturday September 12, 2015 @12:58PM
(#10208567)
> most of which must be public domain
The difficult period is approximately between the 1920s and 1990s, where books are under copyright and may have become orphan works (rightsholders cannot be found).
Re:What Ever Happened to Google Books?
by dragonwriter on Monday September 14, 2015 @12:07PM
(#10215761)
> For books older than my mom, most of which must be public domain
How old is your mom that a book written when she was alive is almost certain to have been written by someone who has now been dead for more than 70 years?
My comment was regarding reCAPTCHA not being used to convert scanned book pages to text.
For books older than my mom, most of which must be public domain, there are a lot online archives. In fact, some of the more common archives like Project Gutenberg, are available as free ebooks on Kindle and iBooks. For more obscure titles, there are field-specific archives from where Google accessed them.
They only got information from publishers and archives. So information you're looking for is out there somewhere in digital form.