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Shout out to the Internet Archive, a non-profit close to what the author describes. Unfortunately it turns out book scanning is expensive and rights-holders still don't like it.

https://archive.org/details/texts&tab=about

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Note that the Internet Archive’s founder Brewster Kahle was one of the strongest critics of the creative class-action settlement which would have allowed Google as a one-off to publish the out-of-print orphan works that it scanned. If the lawsuit had gone to trial and Google prevailed on fair-use, it would have set a precedent that would benefit the Internet Archive. But the Internet Archive was vehemently opposed to any settlement that didn’t help them.

Reference: Brewster’s op-ed http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05... and filings by Internet Archive and Open Book Alliance https://dockets.justia.com/docket/new-york/nysdce/1:2005cv08...

Much of the IA's corpus has come through Google from my own observations. And their BookReader application is really amazing.

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