[ih] Historical documents/books online ? (was: Re: distributed network control: Usenet)

[John Levine]

It appears that Toerless Eckert via Internet-history <tte at cs.fau.de> said:
>Btw: is there any organized efforts to help make historically relevant
>work available ? For example such books as "The Matrix" and others
>mention here ?
>
>I talked to someone whose book is still in print at Springer, and he already
>made the upfront deal to forego royalties, and in return Springer granted the
>right for him to put up the PDF for free on the Internet. He also said
>that  once a book goes out of print, Authors typically do get permission
>from their publishers to make such online version freely available. ...

It's more complicated than that.  Most publishing contracts have a clause that
says that author can get the rights back on request when the book is out of print.
Once the author has the rights, he or she can do anything with the rights they want,
including giving it away.

I did it for one of my books, mostly to see if it was actually
possible. In these days of print on demand, "out of print" has become
meaningless, and publishers routinely keep books in print forever, so
unless your agent is sharp enough to change that to a minimum number
of sales per year you're out of luck. ("Of course it's in print, if
you don't believe me, order a copy.") Even if you can establish that
the book is out of print, getting the publisher to do the assignment
takes forever since it is literally at the absolute bottom of their
list of things to do.

US copyright law has a quirk called termination. In most cases, 30 to
35 years after a book was published an author can send a termination
notice to the publisher, and get the rights back five years later,
without needing the publisher to cooperate. 30 years ago was 1991 and
there are certainly books from that era worth releasing.

R's,
John