[pd-discuss] PRESS RELEASE : Gale releases all its public domain content freely on the open web

[Peter B. Hirtle]

John, I went to the Gale web site and it appears to be the case.  I just downloaded the software and installed it.  When you go to download a book, it gives you individidual  TIFF images for the pages in each title.

Note that I have figure out what constitutes the "book id" for titles in the Sabin Americana set, but I did get it to work with a title in the "Making of the Modern World" collection.

This is incredibly exciting news.  It is exactly what commercial publishers should be doing: releasing public domain content for free and making their money on value-added services.  And it may be a recognition that with the extensive digitization by Google that is underway in Europe right now, most of the titles in these collections will be able for free anyway.

Of course, I haven't yet to see what, if any, tracking Gale may be doing.  But since they are releasing the images under a PD0 license, I can't see any harm that could befall me.

Peter
peter.hirtle at cornell.edu

-----Original Message-----
From: pd-discuss-bounces at lists.okfn.org [mailto:pd-discuss-bounces at lists.okfn.org] On Behalf Of John Mark Ockerbloom
Sent: Wednesday, January 09, 2013 9:39 AM
To: Public Domain discuss list
Subject: Re: [pd-discuss] PRESS RELEASE : Gale releases all its public domain content freely on the open web

Do we have verification on this?  I don't see a mention on the main Gale site, and for some reason the access mechanism they provide is a "downloader" program you have to install on your machine.  I'd love this to be true, but I want to make sure this isn't a hoax (with or without possible malware).

John


On 1/9/13 8:38 AM, info at galecengage-publicdomain.com wrote:
> Gale releases all its public domain content freely on the open web
>
> Andover, Hampshire UK, January 1st, 2013.
>
> Gale, part of Cengage Learning, is thrilled to announce that all its 
> public domain content will be freely accessible on the open web. "On 
> this Public Domain Day, we are proud to have taken such a 
> ground-breaking decision. As a common good, the Public Domain content 
> we have digitized has to be accessible to everyone" said Marmaduke 
> Robida, Director for Public Domain Content, Gale.
> Hundreds of thousands of digitized books coming from some of the 
> world's most prestigious libraries and belonging to top-rated products 
> highly appreciated by the academic community such as "Nineteenth 
> Century Collection Online", "Eighteenth Century Collection Online", 
> "Sabin America", "Making of the Modern World" and two major digitized 
> historical newspaper collections (The Times and the Illustrated London 
> news) are now accessible from a dedicated website called 
> http://galecengage-publicdomain.com . The other Gale digital 
> collections will be progressively added to this web site throughout 
> 2013 so all Public Domain content will be freely accessible by 2014. 
> All the images are or will be available under the Public Domain Mark 
> 1.0 license and can be reused for any purpose.
> Gale's global strategy is inspired by the recommandations issued by 
> the European reflection group "Comite des sages" and the Public Domain 
> manifesto. For Public Domain content, Gale decided to move to a 
> freemium business model : all the content is freely accessible through 
> basic tools (Public Domain Downloader, URL lists, ...), but additional 
> services are charged for. "We are confident that there still is a 
> market for our products. Our state-of-art research platforms offer 
> high quality services and added value which universities or research 
> libraries are ready to pay for" said Robida.
> A specific campaign targeted to national and academic libraries for 
> promoting the usage of Public Domain Mark for digitized content will 
> be launched in 2013. "We are ready to help the libraries that have a 
> digitization programme fulfill their initial mission : make the 
> knowledge accessible to everyone. We also hope that our competitors 
> will follow the same way in the near future. Public Domain should not 
> be enclosed by paywalls or dubious licensing terms" said Robida.
>
> Contact > Marmaduke Robida | Gale Cengage | 
> marmaduke.robida at galecengage-publicdomain.com
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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