Google Books: how to get the full text of public domain books
peter.suber's bookmarks 2021-02-28
Summary:
"While Google Books has digitised millions of books all over the world with the help of thousands of libraries as part of the Library Project, not all of those digitised books are freely available on the website. Books that are still in copyright cannot be consulted in full-text, even though you might see a snippet preview.
Sometimes, however, Google has not assessed the copyright correctly and the book is not publicly available, although Google has scanned it and it is out-of-copyright. That is the case with all books published before 1900 and some books published between 1900 and 1930.
When you know that Google Books has a scan of a book available, and you believe that the book should be in the public domain, you can ask Google to re-evaluate the copyright situation of that publication. The Google Books team will give you an answer in a couple of days...."