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Comment by philipkglass | Hacker News Reader

These Google scans are also available in the HathiTrust [1], an organization built from the big academic libraries that participated in early book digitization efforts. The HathiTrust is better about letting the public read books that have actually fallen into the public domain. I have found many books that are "snippet view" only on Google Books but freely visible on HathiTrust.

If you are a student or researcher at one of the participating HathiTrust institutions, you can also get access to scans of books that are still in copyright.

The one advantage Google Books still has is that its search tools are much faster and sometimes better, so it can be useful to search for phrases or topics on Google Books and then jump over to HathiTrust to read specific books surfaced by the search.

[1] https://www.hathitrust.org/

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Hathitrust has been absolutely transformative for me, as an amateur nuclear enterprise historian.

“…nuclear enterprise…”

As in, the business of running a nuclear energy plant?

Yes. Electricity, propulsion, desalination, space heating, etc.

The old Lia pocket warmer?

Yes!

HathiTrust is a fine example of a repository which is in theory useful but in practice all but useless.

Participation is limited to tertiary academic institutions, and possibly only four-year (rather than two-year) ones. This excludes local (city/county) libraries, as well as primary/secondary (grammar / middle / high school in the US) libraries.

Even public-domain records cannot be downloaded in whole, but rather can be saved one page at a time as PDFs. I'm pretty sure that those interested in more useful archival will and/or have created automated tools to do so, but HathiTrust remains the most notable point-of-access for such works, and the additional generation of conversion and republication further degrades the quality of original-publication formats. (It's less a problem for regenerated works from OCR'd or manually-converted documents, but those of course lose all the characteristics of original publication.)

And of course, many materials still under copyright are not accessible to the general public at all, no matter how obscure. I'd run into a case of this some months back trying to get a date attribution of an Alan Watts lecture which had been posted to HN:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41231047> (thread).

And my request still stands. Anyone with an academic affiliation who can check <https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000678503> and see how it relates to this post (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41230841>) would have my gratitude.

I just put in a request at my university library for that item. I'll let you know what it turns up.

Thank you so much!

For some reason the copy my library has doesn't have that page the same as it appears on hathitrust. Other nearby pages match the snippets I see on google books, but that page does not, and none of the nearby pages do, either. So I'm afraid my search here is a dead end.

You might want to look for:

Watts, Alan. Myth and Religion : the Edited Transcripts. First edition. Boston: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1996.

It contains "Jesus - His Religion, Or the Religion About Him", which appears to be a very slightly different title from the work that you are searching for.

I'd found that text at the time as noted here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41235652>.

The text includes the transcripts, but doesn't include the original date(s) of delivery / publication. And it's published a quarter century after the initial records of the lecture.

As noted, I'd emailed the Alan Watts institute but have received no reply.

Even with institutional login, HathiTrust does not show the full text online for this journal. It only permits searching and then showing the page numbers of the matches, which can be done without logging in.

But I think this journal does not contain the date.

Searching for "his religion" (with quotation marks) in volume 6 via HathiTrust shows a single match on page 11. Searching for the same text via the Google Books link from your other post shows the following entry among a list of what I assume are lectures:

> 919 Jesus: His Religion, Or The Religion About Him ... 10.00 7.00

The first number is some kind of index or serial number. The second number is the cassette cost and the third is the reel cost. You can see the column headings by searching for the number 900.

Searching for "Watts" in the same book via Google Books shows the title of page 11, "New Alan Watts Lectures".

Searching for the year numbers, the matches on that page seem to be for some text about the indexing of works in MMRI-1970, 1971 and 1972, rather than a publication year.

Thanks for checking.

And for confirming that HT is even more useless than I'd thought.

Again: Fuck copyright.

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