How Do You Find Public Domain Works
How Do You Find Public Domain Works
There are a few ways to begin investigating public domain material including:
Hire An Attorney
There are many law firms that will perform a copyright search on your behalf and provide you with information as to whether you are able to use the content or material as you wish.
Do It Yourself
This can take a bit of time but is a free alternative, and using various online resources, it’s relatively easy to find and verify public domain works.
You can search through the copyright office at: http://www.loc.gov/copyright/search/ as well as the Catalog of Copyright Entries, available at: http://www.digital.library.upenn.edu/books/cce/
There are quite a few sources for exploring through the public domain directories including:
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page
Here you can search through the most popular 100 book downloads, or recent downloads from other users, as well as use their search utility to explore specific topics and categories.
Gutenberg.org also offers public domain books in various languages including Hungarian, Chinese, Russian, Polish and even Mayan.
They also feature audio versions of the public domain books, available for free download.
Another useful public domain tool is available at:
AbeBooks is an extensive network of books found within the public domain, as well as rare and out of print books, and features a built-in search engine that you can use to find books in specific categories or topics.
You can also limit the dates that are included in your search, which is a great way to ensure that the books that come up are available for us within the public domain.
Just be sure to place your search to collect results from 1963 or before, remembering that a small percentage of public domain material from between 1923 and 1963 may be copyright protected, but only a very small number of copyrights were renewed, meaning that there are literally thousands of books and material up for grabs.
Another great resource for finding pubic domain books is available at www.BookFinder.com
At Bookfinder, you can enter in the authors name and book title to locate all material associated with your search query.
IBiblio is also another valuable resource for finding public domain works.
http://www.ibiblio.org/index.html
If you locate a book in the public domain that you are interested in possibly reselling or re-packaging, you can order a copy directly from the book distributor at either ABEBooks.com or BookFinder.com
You can also download hundreds of books that have been transformed into digital ebooks directly from Gutenberg.
And yet another method that I use to find high quality books that I can pull from the public domain and re-purpose is through the database available at: http://www.alibris.com