So that leaves the public domain books, where the 70 year rule has come and gone. So there will be no books by those authors either during that seven decade period. And if the author is dead, remember the 70 year rule.
So due to copyright laws, you are not going to get any recently released books on Project Gutenberg, or books where the author is still alive (so forget Harry Potter or John Grisham). This is where sites like Gutenberg come into the picture.
People can print it out and sell their own versions, and more importantly, for the purposes of this manual, the book can be put on the Internet for anyone to download for free. This means basically that the book is up for grabs. The copyright period after death varies slightly depending on the country, but in the European Union and North America, it is 70 years.Īfter that 70 years is up, the book then passes into what is called the “public domain”. The copyright lasts for the author’s entire life, and then for a period of time after the author has died. This stops you and me from stealing the hard work of another author, and quite rightly so. But before we examine the nuts and bolts of the site, we need to take a moment to examine the concept of “public domain”, which is the whole bedrock of the Gutenberg site.Įvery book which comes out is copyrighted. There are many eBook downloading sites on the Internet, but Project Gutenberg is the largest and most well known. You may as well be reading the phone book for all they know. But if you are reading the eBook versions however, nobody knows what you are reading. If you happen to be reading something embarrassing (erotica), or controversial (Hitler’s Mein Kampf), then that makes for some very awkward situations with either people smirking or showing disapproval. If you are on the bus or train reading a print book, everyone can see what you are reading by looking at the cover. Thirdly, people have anonymity reading an eBook. On the other hand, eBooks can be bought in mere seconds at the click of a button, from the comfort of your home. But what if it is raining? What if the shop is far away? What if you’re just plain lazy? Or if you want to buy a book from your local high street store, you have to go out and get there. If you order a print book from Amazon, you typically have to wait 48 hours for it to arrive (or 24 hours if you are a Prime customer). Secondly, people like the speed of obtaining a book.
0 kommentar(er)
