Duke to expand e-books

"This fall Duke will be among the nation's first institutions to offer free online access to books that are still protected by copyright and not in the public domain. Those books, published between 1923 and 1963, will be offered to the public because the owners of the copyrights can't be contacted - either the publishers went out of business or the authors are deceased. The e-books are stored by HathiTrust, a digital partnership of some 60 universities and research institutions. Google Books digitized many of the copyrighted books in the HathiTrust database, but so far Google hasn't received legal clearance to offer public access to those titles. Duke announced the project this week with other universities - Cornell, Emory and Johns Hopkins. They were able to do what Google hasn't been able to because their library systems own print editions of the books...."