And that means free reading material and much, much more!
Today the New York Public Library has announced that out-of-copyright materials in the NYPL Digital Collection are now available as high-resolution downloads with no permission required to use.
The library has released 180,000 digitised items today by simplifying and enhancing the digital access, and this means a trove of rare materials is now available to users around the world in the simplest way possible!
The old system of going to the library and sometimes even paying an administration fee is gone, now you can access a wealth of public domain content and reuse it at your will, absolutely free. What this means for readers is sudden access to thousands of out of copyright book images, covers and manuscripts from American Literary Masters like Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne and others, the correspondence of American political figures such as Thomas Jefferson and much more besides.
The amount of work that must have gone into this project is absolutely immense, and a nerd such as myself can only thank those who made it possible from the very bottom of my heart. The new collection is online right now and has a search function, allowing you to lose half a day browsing (as I have today) and you can access it at digitalcollections.nypl.org for yourself. Not everything in the Digital Collection is public domain, but even the documents that aren’t are now a lot easier to access and read.
Happy browsing, Reading Addicts!
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