Public Domain Books for Print

Even though the public domain in America won't expand for years due to retroactive extensions, there is still a wealth of information available in books published prior to 1923. Google Book Search, the Internet Archive and other digital projects have scanned many of these books. For the first time that I know of, you can now use an easy service to get reprints of these books.

Public Domain Reprints grabs the PDFs from the aforementioned services and then prints them using Lulu.com. For those of you who like to read off screen, this is a nice service.

However, I wonder how long it will be around: The PDFs available of public domain books digitized by Google include, among others, these "usage guidelines:"

"+ Make non-commercial use of the files: We designed Google Book Search for use by individuals, and we request that you use these files for personal, non-commercial purposes.
+ Refrain from automated querying: Do not send automated queries of any sort to Google’s system: If you are conducting research on machine translation, optical character recognition or other areas where access to a large amount of text is helpful, please contact us. We encourage the use of public domain materials for these purposes and may be able to help. "

The creator of this service does insist that it is noncommercial, but he would seem to run afoul of the second guideline. Though Google does not own the copyright to the materials and cannot legally enforce these guidelines through copyright, it is their service and I wouldn't be surprised if they interfered with the automatic querying.

[via Blogoscoped]