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The very best way to be
sure the materials you are using are truly public domain is to
go right to the original published book. But finding an original
source book can be quite difficult. Alibris makes it much
easier.
What is Alibris?
In their own words:
"Alibris connects people
who love books, music and movies to thousands of independent
sellers around the world. Our proprietary technology and
advanced logistics allow us to offer over 30 million used, new
and hard-to-find titles to consumers, libraries and other
institutions."
Basically if you know
Amazon, you understand Alibris. The crucial difference is that
Alibris allows you to do searches based on publication date and
that makes it very valuable indeed.
How to search.
To start a search, you want
to go to the Advanced Search page. Just to to alibris.com and
click on their advanced search button right where it says books.
It is located right below the basic search in the left hand
corner of the home page.
This brings you to a page
with many input options. In addition to the standard title,
keyword, etc. inputs is one very valuable input near the bottom
of the form. It is called Publication Year - and one of its
options is labeled Before. And that is very powerful.
Lets say you were looking
for a book on baseball that was in the public domain. Put the
word baseball in the title and in the publication date/before
field put 1923.
This particular research
pulled up over 200 possible books that you have the opportunity
to purchase and turn into a product.
A word of warning
The search results are only
as good as the data input by the sellers. This means that a
certain percentage of books will not match your search terms and
a certain number of dates will be wrong - specifically I see
lots of books with a publication date of 1900 which is clearly
wrong. (I'm guessing that 1900 is the default if no date is
entered.)
Therefore, before
purchasing a book, it is generally a good idea to send a note to
the particular seller to verify the publication date before
investing money in the book.
While I would much prefer
seeing the book before making a purchase to verify that it meets
my needs, if the price is reasonable enough, I figure it is just
part of the cost of researching for the product.
Oh, and this is also a good
way to search for available books published after 1922 that are
in the public domain. For instance if you are looking at doing a
diet related product, you could search for books say before 1960
and then when you find books with interesting titles, you can
then do a copyright search as discussed in another article on
this site (link at end) to see if the book fell into the public
domain. And who knows, this could result in finding a diamond in
the rough. In fact, at least for diet books, there have been
several bestsellers in recent years based on either a public
domain book or a government publication.
Good luck with your
searching.
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