https://standardebooks.org/about/standard-ebooks-and-the-public-domain
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The public domain is a priceless resource for all of us, and for the generations after us. It’s a free repository of our culture going back centuries—a way for us to see where we came from and to chart where we’re going. It represents our collective cultural heritage.
In the past, copyright was a limited boon, designed not to enrich a creator and their children’s children a hundred years from now, but rather to allow a creator to profit by granting a temporary monopoly on reproduction, in exchange for their work to be returned to the public after a few years. Our ancestors—in fact, the framers of the U.S. Constitution—recognized that art builds on art, and that locking up culture benefits a handful but harms the greater public.
Today, large corporations are putting a lot of money into twisting our laws to slowly but surely strangle the public domain, making it increasingly remote and inaccessible so they can continue seeking rent on ideas and culture nearly a century old. Today laws lock up work not just for the author’s entire lifetime, but for the lifetime of their children, and their children. Copyright can’t enrich the dead, but it can enrich powerful corporations … at our—at everyone’s—expense.
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This site has lots of free classic content. (It has to be in the 100,000’s count.) I like it for old SciFi classics that I read as a child. It’s a shame that Big Publishing keeps locking up content with ever expanding copyright legislation. I wish this was available when I was in school. Now if they just had textbooks, then I’d never have had to take the subway to the library, Laugh!
P.S.: I put a little money into this site to keep it going.
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Posted by reinkefj 
Reinke Faces Life 