[ih] Historical documents/books online ?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

[Charles H Sauer]

On 7/27/2021 4:08 PM, John Levine via Internet-history wrote:
> 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.

I've gotten rights back for four out of print books without difficulty 
or unreasonable delay:
https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2008/02/14/mainstream-videoconferencing-available-again/
https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2020/08/25/computer-systems-performance-modeling/
https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2020/08/25/remembering-resq/

Charlie

> 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
> 

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