English Chess Forum

Hello. What is the reason for some books placed online freely, as on archive.org?
Is it that the Titles themselves are in public domain? Some of the titles are very good, even recommended by FIDE TRG

soheil_hooshdaran wrote: ↑

Fri Oct 05, 2018 6:33 pm

Hello. What is the reason for some books placed online freely, as on archive.org?

I wondered how it worked.

https://archive.org/about/

Because we are a library, we pay special attention to books. Not everyone has access to a public or academic library with a good collection, so to provide universal access we need to provide digital versions of books.

Books published prior to 1923 are available for download, and hundreds of thousands of modern books can be borrowed through our Open Library site.

It operates as a library, so you "borrow" from a limited collection. I didn't explore whether you could make copies for personal use, but it's very likely the terms of borrowing would preclude passing on copies to third parties. Perhaps they've set up the software to lock material against copying.

see, some books, even Kosikov's work, was placed there freely.

Copyright law varies from country to country but, in the United States, copyright typically expires 95 years after publication which I suspect explains the significance of the year 1923.

The title is published by the Gambit publication.