Here is a bitter irony for you. Just as the world’s greatest literature of all ages became available to every person, mostly at no charge, and with only a search and a click, it seems like most people have lost interest. What incredible and tragic timing!
For a large part of the 18th and 19th centuries, as literacy spread with the rise of prosperity, vast numbers of people would have done anything to have a library on the level of Thomas Jefferson’s own. To possess domestic access to books and the ideas contained therein belonged only to the rich.
It was only by the late 19th century that the mass distribution of literature became technologically and economically possible. The result was a generation of parents in moral panic about the seeming disaster that all their kids wanted to do was curl up with a book. Get outside and get some exercise, they were scolded! Jane Austin and the Bronte Sisters were the TikTok of the time, and Lord Byron was the Justin Bieber. The parents hated it but the kids grew up with a powerful literary aspiration.
By the turn of the century, the prospect of a library in every home became possible. This gave rise to wonderful enterprises delivering a book a month to subscribers. There were encyclopedias, of course, but much more. The letters, speeches, and sermons of great Americans of the past were bestsellers. So were the classics. And there was a rush to put together large sets and market them.
You can still see this today in thrift stores and estate sales, where they languish unbought because physical books have lost their appeal. The method of delivery is not really the issue. When digital books came along, I was an immediate convert. Why bundle and contain ideas solely within the limits of physical space when it was possible to set them free for infinite reproduction and distribution? That’s what the digital book makes possible.
Back when Google was an idealistic and earnest company, it had the idea of scanning the whole of large libraries and making their contents available on a new Google Book site. The ambition was awe-inspiring and the company scanned hundreds of thousands of books, both obscure and known. It seemed like the next great step in the unity of technology, literature, and learning.
It seems incredible in retrospect, but the company bumped into a major problem it had not anticipated: copyright, that 16th-century legal concept born of the desire to censor that mutated into an industrial grant of privilege by government. That’s where it stands today.
The rules surrounding copyright are incredibly convoluted, impossible to deduce by logic or reason because they are cobbled together by legislation influenced mainly by pressure-group lobbying. The result of the litigation faced by Google was that it abandoned its big ambitions and folded the work into an ebook sales platform.
The real problem is how copyright has made unavailable millions of books that came out between 1923 and the decades after World War II. There are vast numbers of orphaned works whose “ownership” cannot be clearly discerned. They are like houses in which the title is too ambiguous to trace; they collapsed in disrepair. And there are also vast numbers of works under copyright that are not in print because the author’s family doesn’t care, but they are still denied to publishers. The penalties are too high. And distributors like Amazon are too risk-averse to allow them.
Early in my career, I became especially interested in a category of book that fell within the decades of this copyright trap but escaped due to a technicality. The copyright had to be renewed in order to be maintained. Many small publishers didn’t bother, which technically puts the work into the commons. But figuring out which books were and were not renewed is not so easy for an algorithm so large services gave up, especially given the legal risk.
Once I figured out the legal maze, and the methods to get around it, I was delighted to see that many great works from the interwar period on economics, politics, history, and social theory were in fact available for scanning and posting without facing legal liability. Once discovering the book’s existence, it was a simple matter of finding a copy (interlibrary loan), scanning it, converting it, and posting it in a variety of formats.
Once I figured out the methods, I was a kid in a candy store. Over nearly two decades, I posted hundreds of lost books on these topics and more (I also indulge my passion for ancient music and posted nearly a hundred older works of liturgical music). I did this constantly in the course of these years while serving at several institutions.
In any case, there is no reason to follow the crowd into the land of Netflix, TikTok, and cultural malaise. There are great adventures waiting for you with simple clicks and some time. These are books that will massively improve your life. To know about them and take advantage of them requires a rebellious spirit in our times. But therein lies the path to happiness in a time of the woke hegemon. You don’t have to participate. I’m truly grateful to Free the People for making all this available again. You should be too.
