The final way to clear a painting for use as a cover image is to locate a reproduction of that painting in a book published before . This option gives you the most freedom in finding a suitable image, but it can be difficult; proving an artwork’s public domain status this way can sometimes be the most time-consuming part of the ebook production process.
-This process involves: (1) identifying a work of art that you think will be a suitable cover, then (2) finding book page scans with a reproduction of that artwork in a book published before at an online book archive like the Internet Archive, Google Books, or Hathi Trust. (Note that if your IP address is not in the U.S., some book archives may disable book previews.)
+This process involves: (1) identifying a work of art that you think will be a suitable cover, then (2) finding book page scans with a reproduction of that artwork in a book published before at an online book archive like the Internet Archive, Google Books, or HathiTrust. (Note that if your IP address is not in the U.S., some book archives may disable book previews.)
In older books it was common to have etchings of paintings. Etchings are not strict reproductions, and so we cannot count them for PD clearance. Etchings can sometimes be identified by: (1) having more clearly defined lines, or shading with more contrast; (2) having shading done with a stipple effect; (3) differences in small amorphous details like the shape of clouds, trees, or fabric compared to the original painting. Etchings mostly fell out of use by around 1900.
Painters often produced several different versions of the same artwork. For PD clearance, your scan must be of the exact version you will be using. Carefully compare the two. Check for differences in small details, like the position of trees, clouds, reflections, or water. Any difference and the proof will be rejected.
Do not rely on the date given in the catalog entry at Hathi Trust or the Internet Archive; these can be wrong. Please verify the page scan of the copyright page to ensure the book was published before .
Do not rely on the date given in the catalog entry at HathiTrust or the Internet Archive; these can be wrong. Please verify the page scan of the copyright page to ensure the book was published before .
Internet Archive has the widest amount of scans, with the most permissive viewing and lending policy. Hathi Trust has many of the same scans as Google Books, but with a more permissive viewing policy. Google Books restricts readers based on IP address and does a poor job of implementing per-country copyright law, so people outside of the U.S. may not be able to access scans of books that are in the public domain of their country.
+Internet Archive has the widest amount of scans, with the most permissive viewing and lending policy. HathiTrust has many of the same scans as Google Books, but with a more permissive viewing policy. Google Books restricts readers based on IP address and does a poor job of implementing per-country copyright law, so people outside of the U.S. may not be able to access scans of books that are in the public domain of their country.
Each of those sources allows you to filter results by publication date, so make sure you select a maximum publication date of December 31, (in other words, everything published before ) to ensure they’re in the U.S. public domain.
Please keep the following important notes in mind when searching for page scans:
se create-draft put a skeleton imprint.xhtml file in the ./src/epub/text/ folder. Fill out the links to the transcription and page scans.
There’s also a skeleton colophon.xhtml file. Now that we have the cover image and artist, we can fill out the various fields there. Make sure to credit the original transcribers of the text (generally we assume them to be whoever’s name is on the file we download from Project Gutenberg) and to include a link back to the Gutenberg text we used, along with a link to any scans we used (from the Internet Archive or Hathi Trust, for example).
There’s also a skeleton colophon.xhtml file. Now that we have the cover image and artist, we can fill out the various fields there. Make sure to credit the original transcribers of the text (generally we assume them to be whoever’s name is on the file we download from Project Gutenberg) and to include a link back to the Gutenberg text we used, along with a link to any scans we used (from the Internet Archive or HathiTrust, for example).
You can also include your own name as the producer of this Standard Ebooks edition. Besides that, the colophon is standardized; don’t get too creative with it.
Leave the release date unchanged, as se prepare-release will fill it in for you in a later step.
Once you’re done, commit:
diff --git a/www/contribute/report-errors-upstream.php b/www/contribute/report-errors-upstream.php index 06095ef3..bf91f7f7 100644 --- a/www/contribute/report-errors-upstream.php +++ b/www/contribute/report-errors-upstream.php @@ -7,7 +7,7 @@To do this, find your book on the Standard Ebooks site and scroll to the “More Details” section. For example, here’s that section for Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd. You’ll see that as well as links to the book’s page on Wikipedia and its repository of source code, there are links to the page scans at the Internet Archive and the original transcriptions at Project Gutenberg. These last two are the two we’re interested in.
Gutenberg will happily fix problems with their transcriptions, but want errata reports formatted in a particular way, with proposed changes referenced against the line number of the plain text version of the transcription in question. Let’s look at a recent example.
-A single error was found while proofing Maurice Leblanc’s The Golden Triangle: a chapter title had an “E” instead of an “É”. The book’s page on Gutenberg has a link to the plain text version. Copying that into a text editor showed that the error (since fixed) was on line 9756. We also know from the ebook’s “More Details” section that the source scans are available at the Hathi Trust Digital Library. That meant that the following email could be sent to Gutenberg:
+A single error was found while proofing Maurice Leblanc’s The Golden Triangle: a chapter title had an “E” instead of an “É”. The book’s page on Gutenberg has a link to the plain text version. Copying that into a text editor showed that the error (since fixed) was on line 9756. We also know from the ebook’s “More Details” section that the source scans are available at the HathiTrust Digital Library. That meant that the following email could be sent to Gutenberg:
Hi, I’ve been proofing The Golden Triangle against the source scans at https://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.hw5y1w and found a single error with a missing accent:
Title: The Golden Triangle, by Maurice Leblanc
Release Date: 30 Dec 2010 [EBook #34795]
File: 34795-0.txt