The "Rare Book Room" (way too cool)!

Ticktockman · Post by **Ticktockman** » June 28th, 2007, 3:45 am

Haven't figured out if there'd be copyright issues, but I would doubt it.

The "Rare Book Room" site has been constructed as an educational site intended to allow the visitor to examine and read some of the great books of the world.

Over the last ten years, a company called "Octavo" embarked on digitally photographing some of the world ’s great books from some of the greatest libraries. These books were photographed at very high resolution (in some cases at over 200 megabytes per page).

This site contains all of the books (about 400) that have been digitized to date. These range over a wide variety of topics and rarity. The books are presented so that the viewer can examine all the pages in medium to medium-high resolution.

In particular the site contains:

1. Some of the great books in science, including books by Galileo, Newton, Copernicus, Kepler, Einstein, Darwin and others.

2. Most of the Shakespeare Quartos from the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the University of Edinburgh Library, and the National Library of Scotland. It also contains the First Folio from the Folger Shakespeare Library.

3. The complet copies of Poor Richard ’s Almanac by Benjaman Franklin.

4. Very rare editions: Gutenberg ’s Bible of 1455 (from the Library of Congress), Harvey's book on the circulation of blood, Galileo ’s Siderius Nuncius, the first printing of the Bill of Rights, and the Magna Carta.

http://www.rarebookroom.org/

Enjoy,
TTM

Cori · Post by **Cori** » June 28th, 2007, 4:47 am

FWIW, each page image is labelled as copyright to Octavo, and for research use only.

Pretty easy to use, once I'd allowed the site to use popups. And lovely scans!

Ticktockman · Post by **Ticktockman** » June 28th, 2007, 5:05 am

Rats

Cori · Post by **Cori** » June 28th, 2007, 5:11 am

Might not hurt to fire off an enquiring email anyway, since the words of the texts themselves are in the Public Domain, and we wouldn't be reusing the scans per se. And of course we'd be promoting their site as we catalogued the books.

Ticktockman · Post by **Ticktockman** » June 28th, 2007, 6:59 am

Thanks, Cori...you ROCK

Greetings,

I am involved in the LibriVox mission of recording public domain works
and making them freely available for download:
http://librivox.org/

I see that you have copyright notices on your editions, but would like
to know whether we can use them for recording. The Librivox community is
quite active, and may be the largest source of audiobooks available on
the internet. We always post our sources in our catalog, which could
bring oodles of traffic to your website.

Please let us know your thoughts on this.

Respectfully yours,
ML Cohen

earthcalling · Post by **earthcalling** » June 28th, 2007, 11:13 am

Surely they can't copyright the texts, though. Only the images, and we wouldn't reproduce those.

So, though it's polite to ask, they don't have a right to stop us. At least, that's my (non-expert) view.

Ticktockman · Post by **Ticktockman** » June 28th, 2007, 11:24 am

Should we add it to the Source Wiki?

not that I know how to do that

Cori · Post by **Cori** » June 28th, 2007, 11:28 am

I'm not sure how it works, I'd lean towards agreeing with you, David, and a legal opinion would be good.

I wouldn't add them to the wiki yet, TTM, because I'm all paranoid like that.

thistlechick · Post by **thistlechick** » June 28th, 2007, 4:19 pm

earthcalling wrote:Surely they can't copyright the texts, though. Only the images, and we wouldn't reproduce those.

So, though it's polite to ask, they don't have a right to stop us. At least, that's my (non-expert) view.

Yes, this is exactly right... Here's what Project Gutenberg has to say on this topic: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:No_Sweat_of_the_Brow_Copyright

Please add the resource to the wiki =)

Ticktockman · Post by **Ticktockman** » June 28th, 2007, 4:23 pm

I think I might've already mentioned my inadequacy in this department

Post by **knotyouraveragejo** » June 28th, 2007, 5:57 pm

thistlechick wrote:
Please add the resource to the wiki =)

Done!

Geremia · Post by **Geremia** » January 24th, 2014, 1:55 pm

Ticktockman wrote:http://www.rarebookroom.org/

The Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America's website allows searching for rare books; it's pretty neat.

Post by **annise** » January 24th, 2014, 2:13 pm

Geremia wrote:
Ticktockman wrote:http://www.rarebookroom.org/
The Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America's website allows searching for rare books; it's pretty neat.

I couldn't see any option to read them though - did I miss something ?

Anne

Geremia · Post by **Geremia** » January 27th, 2014, 3:35 pm

annise wrote:
Geremia wrote:
Ticktockman wrote:http://www.rarebookroom.org/
The Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America's website allows searching for rare books; it's pretty neat.
I couldn't see any option to read them though - did I miss something ?

Anne

You can see select pages on some of them, I think. For example, the first result for searching for "Aquinas" brings this page, which has some thumbnails of select pages.