Friday, February 29, 2008

eTexts of Older Series Books

When I search eBay for books, I frequently find etexts of various older series books for sale. Sometimes the seller offers a bunch of books on a disc, and other times the seller offers to send the etext via a file that can be downloaded. I always ignore these listings simply because I prefer to own the actual book rather than read the text on my computer screen. 

There is another reason to ignore these listings. The sellers obtained the texts from various websites that have the files available for free download. There is no reason to pay any seller for these texts. Many of the older Stratemeyer Syndicate books are in the public domain because the Syndicate allowed the copyrights to lapse during the early part of the 20th century. The effort to prevent the Syndicate's most valued holdings from entering the public domain was likely one of the primary reasons that the Syndicate revised the texts of the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books. 

Project Gutenberg has the texts of thousands of books available on its website. Enter a search for a series title such as the Bobbsey Twins or for the series author such as Laura Lee Hope, and the site's search engine will list all of the available titles. The site contains all seven of the Moving Picture Girls books as well as many of the Ruth Fielding, Outdoor Girls, Tom Swift, Betty Gordon, Dorothy Dale, Six Little Bunkers, and other early series books. 

Perhaps you're interested in reading an excerpt of the first book in order to decide whether to collect the series? You can go to Project Gutenberg and read the first book before deciding whether to proceed.

1 comment:

keeline said...

In the US, in general, texts from 1922 and earlier are public domain. The Sonny Bono extension has ensured that more recent texts will not be added for 20 years more than would have been the case under the 1976 law.

However, new digital copies of older series books are being added all the time to Project Gutenberg and other venues for us to enjoy.

The University of Pennsylvania has an "Online Books" page with a database of electronic texts in various forms from several sites, including Project Gutenberg.

Dr. Deidre Johnson has a number of links to girls' series, including some transcriptions she has created herself on her ReadSeries.com page.

Mary Crosson has long had a "Free Series Books" page of links to electronic texts.

Google and Microsoft have begun book scanning projects from items in libraries. This has included a good number of series books. These can be read online or downloaded as PDF files which can be read using a free reader program such as Adobe Acrobat Reader. The PDFs are a little different than ones you might make from a word processor. They are scanned page images and this can make the files fairly large. The PDF files from the Microsoft project are text searchable while the Google ones are not. You can search for text in the content on the web readers for both. The search engine for Google Books is better. Often it is best to check both sources since a book which is not in one project may be in another.

http://books.google.com
http://books.live.com

Reading an electronic version is never quite the same as holding a real book in your hand. Some entrepreneurs take either the PG texts or PDFs from the scanning projects and "publish" them through print-on-demand technology. One such "publisher" is Kessinger who routinely gets PDFs from the Microsoft project. Of course, this company does no editing or processing at all and the printed copies are only as good as the scans from the project. Every book they have has a disclaimer that the book may contain blurry or missing pages. Some of the copies of these "reprints" are vastly overpriced.

Regular people can use print-on-demand technology to have books made using sites like Lulu.com.

James Keeline