I enjoy narrating classics whenever I can. But, determining the copyright status on some of these older titles can be tricky, especially since United States Copyright law can seem overly complex and convoluted.
To make matters worse, the US Copyright office has not digitized any records before 1978. So, the only way to be 100% certain is to head to the Library of Congress and look through all of the old records yourself (or hire someone to do it for you).
As part of the Universal Library Project, a team at Carnegie Mellon scanned the older records, and volunteers at both Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders did their best to correct the OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Jarkko Hietaniemi, an engineer at Google, then combined both sources into a single XML file. But there was still no way for a casual user to search this data easily.
So, I built this search tool 🙂
Just enter all (or part) of a book title, check the box, if applicable, and search!
A ridiculous amount of caffeine was consumed while researching.
Add some fuel if you would like to help keep me going!
☕ $5 ☕ $10 ☕ $15 ☕ $20 ☕ $25 ☕ $50
NOTE: The Copyright Renewal Checker searches the sources mentioned above. It does not, and cannot, search the complete records of the US Library of Congress. So, though finding a title here proves it’s copyright status, not finding a title here does not prove that the title is in the public domain! After all, it is possible that the title just never got transcribed.