Ask HN: Rescuing a book collection?

In 2009 Wikipedia ran into a similar problem with the National Portrait Gallery: http://www.examiner.com/museum-in-san-francisco/internet-101..., here's what Wikipedia has to say about the C&D letter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Portrait_Gallery_copyr.... Someone figured out how the gallery's image servers worked and downloaded originals (normally you were allowed to see only low-res copies). As of today, they are still on Wikipedia (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:National_Portrait...)

My recommendations are:

* Build a nice website, but don't put too much time into it (~a weekend perhaps) and put the images online

* Make sure you give proper reference as to original source of the images

* Try to contact someone from Hockliffe Collection (but don't try too hard), as rmah says this is the polite thing to do. Document your effort on a blog for all to see.

* Don't feel squeamish about asking for donations to cover server expenses, etc. In fact, I would definitely go this route rather than putting ads on the page.

* If someone sends a C&D, contact Wikipedia guys and see if they can help. Generally the threat of negative publicity is enough for the institutions to back down.

They may still be able to shut you off, after all you don't have the clout of Wikipedia. But still, I think the utility you'll provide to the general public far outweighs any risk.

I could probably stick them up on S3 fairly cheaply so I'm not really worried about the cost, but I think hosting them myself would likely just be a temporary solution, I'd rather hand them over to someone who could give them a long-term home.

Maybe I should just seed it onto bittorrent, at least that way at least I'll know I'm not the only person who still has a copy of the book scans :-)

I don't know about bittorrent, to a lot of "normal" people that smacks of piracy. I think S3 is a much better idea. Once you get some publicity and traction, which I'm sure you will, you can then ask for volunteers to host them.

I for one am looking forward to reading from these books to my son on my iPad!

S3 uses bit torrent...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_S3#Design

Most (all) of the actual books should be out of copyright at this point and thus public domain. This means, from a copyright perspective, there is no longer any ownership of the books and you can do anything you want.

However, since the scanning was done recently, the scans may be copyrighted by the Hockliffe Collection. The website certainly would be. It may be prudent to speak to a copyright attorney about it. I think it would also be the polite thing to do contact someone from the original foundation if possible to discuss this.

> However, since the scanning was done recently, the scans may be copyrighted by the Hockliffe Collection.

In the U.S. at least, scans probably aren't subject to a separate copyright; they're too direct and uncreative a copy, so they just inherit the copyright of the original work. Wikimedia Commons advises people to operate as if scans aren't separately copyrightable, anyway: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:When_to_use_the_PD...

Maybe Project Gutenberg would like them... Also Amazon or Google Books might be interested in them.

I've only got the images and not the text form, I tried running them through Abbey Finereader (the OCR package that PG normally use) a while back and didn't get great results, presumably because of the age of the books. So I'm guessing Project Gutenberg would be unlikely to be able to make use of them.

Send it to Distributed Proofreaders http://www.pgdp.net/ - they work with Project Gutenberg to OCR books.

You can also sign up and help proofread OCR'd books (every OCR is manually checked by humans).

All the Project Gutenberg books are proofread by humans in the end. So they may be able to use these after all. No harm in asking.

I would contact PG, they have a lot of experience with OCR and can use people like distributed proofreaders to fix the mistakes.

At minimum if you give them a copy then they will keep it secure if you later lose interest