Author Archives: Authors Alliance

Spotlight on Book Publication Contracts: Providing Input on Cover Design and Pricing

Posted February 19, 2019

In our Spotlight on Book Publication Contracts series, we are shining the light on the ways that authors can negotiate for publication contract terms that help them make and keep their books available in the ways they want. This series is based on the information, strategies, and success stories in our guide to Understanding and Negotiating Book Publication Contracts. Be sure to check out the online or print version of our guide for more details on these and other strategies to help you meet your creative and pragmatic goals.

We’ve highlighted contract terms that help authors meet open access goals and featured ways authors can shape their publication contracts to retain some control over their rights. In this installment of our Spotlight on Publication Contracts, we’re sharing ways you can shape your contract to give you a say in how your work will be presented to the world.

Contracts typically include clauses that allocate the decision-making authority for important parts of the publishing process—from the timing of publication to the title of the work. Your publisher will likely approach these decisions with an eye towards maximizing profit, which may well align with your interests. But you may also have a stake in these decisions because they can influence how you and your work are perceived by potential readers. In this post, we cover ways you can have a say in your book’s cover design and the price of your book.

Cover Design

While a publisher’s choices about the cover design for your book will likely reflect its best judgment on what will help the book sell. But sometimes, you may have strong preferences and want to include in your contract a right of approval over any cover design decisions.

Success Story: When Authors Alliance member Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohn negotiated the contract for her book Swirling: How to Date, Mate, and Relate; Mixing Race, Culture, and Creed, she encountered a provision that would allow her to pick a book cover out of three options. Because she knew that her book’s theme would be challenging to portray artistically, she crossed out this provision and added in language giving her final say over the book’s cover. Her publisher accepted this change. Later, when her publisher sent Janice three unappealing book covers to choose from, Janice proposed that a graphic designer she knew should design the cover instead. Her publisher initially balked, but when she pointed out that she had final approval rights her publisher relented and gave Janice the cover she wanted.

As an alternative, you could consider including a contract term giving you the right to be consulted as the cover design is contemplated. The publisher will still have the final say, but it will at least be obligated to consider your ideas in the process.

Pricing

Pricing is usually central to your publisher’s marketing strategy. Your publisher will likely select a price for your book based on historical sales figures, prices of comparable books, cost of production, and other factors. But pricing is an important consideration for some authors. For example, some authors of academic books want to make their works available at a price that is affordable to students.

If it is important to you that your book is sold at a specific price, you can ask your publisher to share its anticipated production expenses and sales projections for your book so you can better understand its pricing strategy. If you understand what factors are driving your publisher’s pricing decision, you could negotiate for specific changes—such as agreeing to a lesser page count or using fewer illustrations—that will help keep the price low.

Success Story: When Pamela Samuelson negotiated the contract for her forthcoming book, making it available at an affordable price in both hardcover and paperback editions was one of her key concerns. Therefore, before negotiating she looked at the price of other books on similar subject matter issued by the publisher. Professor Samuelson singled out those books that had a price within her acceptable range and whose page count and format were comparable to hers, and then told her publisher she wanted her work to be priced like those books. To sweeten the deal, she offered to forgo an advance on royalties, which would reduce her publisher’s upfront costs. As a result, Samuelson was successful in getting her publisher to agree to price the book in the range that she wanted.

Even if you can’t get your publisher to agree to sell your book at a specific price, there are still some indirect strategies you could pursue to make your book more affordable. For example, you can ask your publisher to release your book only in paperback, make it available as an e-book, or simultaneously release your book in hardcover and paperback.

For more on how to ensure you can provide input on the finishing touches of your book, including the timing for publication, the formats which it will be made available, its title, and design and production decisions, see pages 144-158 of Understanding and Negotiating Book Publication Contracts.

Giving the Authors a Voice in Litigation? An ACS v. ResearchGate Update

Posted February 15, 2019

We’re grateful to David Hansen, Director of Copyright & Scholarly Communications at Duke, for granting permission for us to repost the following update on the ACS v. ResearchGate lawsuit. This article originally appeared on the Scholarly Communications @ Duke blog.

You might recall me writing about ACS v. ResearchGate, a lawsuit filed last fall in the United States by ACS and Elsevier against ResearchGate. It followed a similar lawsuit filed a year earlier in Germany. In both the German and U.S. versions of this lawsuit, the basic complaint is that ResearchGate infringed the publishers’ copyrights by hosting and publicly distributing scholarly articles for which the publishers claim to own exclusive rights.

Nothing had happened in the U.S. case for months, but yesterday ResearchGate made several filings. ResearchGate has apparently retained Durie Tangri (the same law firm that represented Google in the Google Books lawsuit) and has invested in making some opening arguments that I think are pretty smart.

Authors’ rights: the argument I’ve been waiting for

The most interesting ResearchGate filing isn’t its factual answer to the complaint, but rather the motion that ResearchGate made accompanying its answer. That motion, with the inconspicuous title of “Motion for Notice Under 17 U.S.C. § 501(b)” asks the court to open the door for something big: communicating about the litigation with the actual authors of the articles posted to ResearchGate. Imagine that!

ResearchGate begins its argument by pointing out the unusual nature of the case, and why it is so important to clearly sort out who owns rights (authors versus publishers) in the articles underlying the lawsuit:

A typical copyright infringement lawsuit about copyrighted material appearing online involves a content creator suing a website owner when an unauthorized third party has posted the creator’s work to the website without the creator’s permission. But here, [the publishers] are suing . . . ResearchGate for allowing scientists to share their own work. . . . Under Plaintiffs’ infringement theories, if ResearchGate is infringing Plaintiffs’ copyrights in the articles at issue here, so are those articles’ authors. Accordingly, a finding that the appearance of those articles on the ResearchGate site was infringing would necessarily mean that the people who conducted the research and wrote the articles did not have the right to share them.

The motion goes on to argue that many authors of these articles (almost all of which were co-authored) still hold a valid copyright interest in them that would allow those authors to legally post the articles to ResearchGate. Even assuming that the publishers obtained valid transfers of exclusive rights from the corresponding authors, ResearchGate argues that there is no evidence that the publishers also obtained a valid transfer of exclusive rights from co-authors of the papers. Thus, those co-authors are free to make what uses they want with their papers, including posting to ResearchGate.

Given that these authors may hold rights, ResearchGate argues that § 501(b) of the Copyright Act allows (and may even require) the court to order notification of those authors as third parties who have a “claim or interest” in the copyrighted works at issue. Section 501(b) provides that the court:

may require written notice of the action with a copy of the complaint provided to “any person shown . . . to have or claim an interest in the copyright,” and
shall require that such notice be served upon any person whose “interest is likely to be affected by a decision in the case,”

In addition to notification, the statute also provides for a way to actually bring third-parties into the lawsuit. It says that the court “may require the joinder, and shall permit the intervention of any person having or claiming an interest in the copyright” (emphasis mine).

ResearchGate is, for now, just asking the court to order the plaintiffs to notify other potential copyright owners about the lawsuit. Specifically, ResearchGate is asking the court to “order Plaintiff’s “to serve ‘written notice of the action with a copy of the complaint upon’ each co-author of each journal article at issue in the lawsuit who is not a corresponding author. . . .” I don’t know exactly how many authors that is (as I’ve said previously, there are over 3,000 articles), but it’s probably a lot.

Procedure, procedure, procedure

You may think I’m getting all worked up over a little bit of civil procedure. Maybe. But I think it is important because over and over again we’ve seen large-scale copyright infringement suits fought between the large organizations (e.g., Authors Guild v. Google, Authors Guild v. HathiTrust, Elsevier v. SciHub, Cambridge University Press v. Becker (Ga. State)) without much input at all from the actual authors of the works that form the basis of those lawsuits. When those authors have been allowed to have a say, such as in the Google Books class action certification process, their input has meaningfully altered the outcome.

For the ResearchGate litigation, it seems like a good start to at least require the Plaintiffs to notify authors that their work is being used as the basis for a copyright infringement lawsuit. I would hope, once authors are notified, that the court would also allow those same authors to intervene, as the statute allows, to have their own say in how their works are shared with the world.

Rights Reversion Success Story: James O’Donnell

Posted February 12, 2019

Head shot of James O'Donnell

James J. O’Donnell is the University Librarian at Arizona State University Libraries and has published widely on the history and culture of the late antique Mediterranean world. He successfully reverted rights to his 1992 edition of Augustine’s Confessions and made the book available in an open access digital version. Continued interest in the online book led to a subsequent reprint and later an additional paperback print run. Professor O’Donnell shared his rights reversion experience with us in the following Q&A.

Authors Alliance: How did you first learn of rights reversion?

James O’Donnell: In the course of becoming involved in digital publishing in 1990 and after (and founding the oldest open access online journal in the humanities, Bryn Mawr Classical Review), I had been around conversations about rights and about signing away as little as you need to [in a contract]. The book in question, Augustine: Confessions (Oxford University Press 1992, 3 volumes) was in my mind at the time, so I familiarized myself [with rights reversion].

My book was expensive and specialized, with a first print run of 1,000 copies and a provision that I would get royalties if it sold more than 600 copies. The book sold for $300, or about $550 in 2018 dollars. I figured this meant that OUP expected to sell 600 copies, or a few more. In fact it had a reprinting of 250 copies and sold out all of those. In 1995, my editor at Oxford told me with regret that she had been unsuccessful in getting a paperback edition, so the book was going out of print. I was remarkably cheerful about this prospect [because it made the book eligible for reversion].

AuAll: What motivated you to request your rights back?

JJO: I had been speaking of digital “postprints” for some time and had in fact posted an earlier book of mine from 1979 (long out of print) in that way. The Oxford volumes of Augustine’s Confessions were meant to be of high value for scholarly users, from student to researcher, and I was well aware that use was naturally limited to library copies, often non-circulating. I wanted better.

AuAll: Were you eligible to exercise a clause in your contract granting reversion rights?

JJO: Yes, I wrote a simple letter to Oxford University Press. There was a clear clause in the contract.

AuAll: How has the reversion helped you? What have you been able to do with your book since reversion?

JJO: First, I worked with a consortium of scholars doing Internet publishing in classics to create a digital online version of my edition of Augustine’s Confessions, now hosted at the Stoa Consortium and at Georgetown University (my former institution) on mirror sites. This resource has been available for about twenty years and is regularly praised as a teaching and research tool of considerable value.

Then, in about 2000, OUP decided to have another publisher, Sandpiper Books, do limited run reprints (not yet print-on-demand) of some of their “greatest hits” of scholarly publishing in classics, and chose to include Confessions in the series. When they told me they intended to do this, I reminded them that the rights were now mine, and we proceeded to agree on terms for licensing this specific use for a modest stipend.

Around 2012, OUP decided that the book indeed had legs and made it available in paperback. It has been in print in that format since 2013 for $179, or about one-third the original hardcover price. It was surely the case that the digital presence with open access on the web kept my book in mind and created the market for those who decided they needed a print copy. It is highly unlikely that the book would have had better sales without the e-version (and quite likely that it would not have done as well).

AuAll: What advice do you have for other authors who might want to pursue a reversion of rights?

JJO: Authors should know what they want out of their books, other than the traditional thin stream of royalties that academic books receive. They should inform themselves about their rights, sign rights away carefully at the outset, and then keep an eye on just what outcome they are looking for. My sense is that with the ease of print-on-demand technology, many books may effectively never go “out of print,” requiring a different kind of strategy and vigilance for authors.

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We couldn’t agree more! Authors should be informed about their rights, and have strategies in mind for using them wisely—not only at the time a book deal is signed, but in future years, as well. To that end, we recommend two of our educational resources to help authors understand what exactly rights reversion is, how reversion fits into a book publication contract, and how to successfully secure a reversion of rights.

If, like Professor O’Donnell, you have previously published books and wish to learn more about regaining your rights, visit our Rights Reversion resource page, where you’ll find our complete guide to Understanding Rights Reversion, letter templates for use in contacting your publisher, and a collection of reversion success stories from other authors who successfully regained their rights and made their works more widely available.

If you currently have a book in progress and have not yet placed it with a publisher, we also recommend visiting our Publication Contracts resource page, which features our new guide to Understanding and Negotiating Book Publication Contracts. Knowing about rights reversion and reversion clauses before you sign your publication contract can help to clarify the conditions for reversion and pave the way for a successful reversion of rights in the future.

Authors Speak Out in Favor of Controlled Digital Lending

Posted February 4, 2019

In September 2018, Authors Alliance joined with other organizations including the Digital Public Library of America, Internet Archive, and UC Berkeley Library to sign on to a statement in support of Controlled Digital Lending (CDL). CDL offers a good-faith interpretation of copyright law for libraries considering digitizing works in their collections and circulating the digitized title in place of a physical one. The statement is accompanied by an in-depth white paper by David Hansen and Kyle K. Courtney analyzing the legal arguments for CDL.

Under the CDL’s digitize-and-lend model, libraries make digital copies of scanned books from their collections available to patrons (the hard copy is not available for lending while the digital copy is checked out, and vice versa). A library can only circulate the same number of copies that it owned before digitization. Like physical books, the scanned copies are loaned to one person at a time and are subject to limited check-out periods.

System design choices and collection decisions, like selecting books that are orphaned (works for which the copyright owner cannot be identified or located), books that are out of print, or books that are non-fiction or primarily factual enhance the fair use arguments that underpin CDL. As Hansen and Courtney explain, CDL is “not meant to be a competitor to Overdrive, nor a replacement for licensing e-books of best-sellers or other currently licensable e-book content,” but CDL is particularly helpful to “address access to the large number of books published in the ’20^th Century black hole’ that have little hope of otherwise bring made available to readers online.”

Libraries are now using CDL to lend books, so we asked our members to share their views on their books being made available through CDL. Here’s what they had to say:

CDL benefits authors, readers, and researchers

I was thrilled to see one of my books available through Controlled Digital Lending at the Internet Archive. It’s an older book that’s relatively hard to find, and I’m so pleased that people can get access to it today. CDL is an excellent way for authors like me to reach readers. But it’s also a way for authors to do research without having to visit remote archives or libraries. I’ve done a great deal of historical research on out-of-print books and periodicals through CDL programs, and I’m incredibly grateful for it.
– Annalee Newitz
Author and Journalist

CDL helps to increase access to
out-of-print and otherwise unavailable works

Controlled Digital Lending provides authors with an opportunity to reach a broad public, especially if their books have gone out of print. It does not cut down on their royalties any more than sales to libraries do, and by making works widely available, it can give them new life. Several of my books are accessible through CDL, and I am delighted with the result.
– Robert Darnton
Professor of History and University Librarian Emeritus, Harvard University

CDL is a reasonable interpretation of fair use

CDL is beneficial for all authors whose readerships are not served by the narrow interpretation of the fair use doctrine that is the foundation of various objections to CDL. Library lending must move forward into the digital future, and part of that future is getting more authors’ works into the hands of more readers, which CDL helps to make possible. Only a few authors’ needs are served by restrictive models of access: most of us need all the help we can get connecting readers to our works! In addition, libraries are among the most important institutions in contemporary society, representing freedom of access to information. How many other ideals-driven public institutions are as alive as the library world? The CDL is an important 21st century expansion of that mandate. Let objecting authors remove their works, and let the rest of us share our books with the reading public through library systems.
– Megan Prelinger
Author
Inside the Machine: Art and Invention in the Electronic Age (W.W. Norton, 2015)
Another Science Fiction Advertising the Space Race (Blast Books, 2010)

CDL can alleviate the gaps in availability
brought about by overly long copyright terms

In the treacherous, fearful underworld of Rights and Permissions I am often confused: I know that the Evil Mouse, manipulating the late Rep. Sonny Bono and others, extended copyright beyond reason. My feeling is that if my books bring royalty money to my children after I am gone, that is good. But as to my grandchildren—I love them beyond measure, but let them write their own books.
I don’t want to deprive any fellow-writers of income from their creations. Those property rights sometimes conflict with the author’s desire—strong in us poets—to be read. Those conflicting values: to be valued, and to be read—are part of what makes the terrain so scary.
May Controlled Digital Lending, as a protective guide there, be wisely Controlled.

– Robert Pinsky
former U.S. Poet Laureate

CDL helps authors reach audiences

I write so that people will read my books. That’s reason enough for me to support CDL.
– Paul Brest
Former Dean and Professor Emeritus (active) at Stanford Law School

The Public Domain and Scholarly Research: Alexandra Stern on Increased Access to the History of American Eugenics

Posted January 31, 2019

We are grateful to Alexandra Minna Stern for this contribution to our series of posts on the public domain. Stern is Professor and Chair of the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan. She also holds appointments in the Departments of History, Women’s Studies, and Obstetrics and Gynecology. She directs the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab housed in the Department of American Culture. Her research focuses on the history of eugenics, genetics, society, and justice in the United States and Latin America.

The convergence of open digital access and large-scale text scanning projects makes 2019 Public Domain day a major event for scholars of American history and culture. Thanks to HathiTrust, more than 50,000 materials from 1923 including books, films, and musical scores are available for unrestricted use and distribution.

This is a boon for historians of science and society, particularly those of us interested in the history of that misguided science of genetic selection—eugenics—that played a role in justifying racial immigration quotas and the sterilization of the “unfit” in the early twentieth-century. The eugenics era is disturbing and fascinating on its own historical terms and deserves further scrutiny. It also can serve as an ideological antecedent for key facets of the rhetoric of white nationalism that has surfaced in recent years and was on display at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017.

Celebrating New Public Domain Works: Enchanted Bunnies

Posted January 29, 2019

Illustration of a child with bugle surrounded by a circle of bunnies.

Enchanted Bunnies (1923)

Among the treasures that entered the public domain on January 1, 2019 is The Tale of the Enchanted Bunnies, a 1923 children’s book by Ruth Sawyer. Described as “a story teller with consummate gifts whose tales both oral and written should be characterized as living folk-art,”[1] Sawyer was a prolific author who started the first storytelling program for children at the New York Public Library in 1910. Sawyer won the Newbery Medal for her 1936 children’s book Roller Skates and received the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award in 1965 for her lifetime achievement in children’s literature.

Enchanted Bunnies follows Billy and Budge Bates as they break the spells placed on Lady Rabbit’s collection of silver, brass, china, alabaster, and crocheted bunnies, bringing them to life to share the events leading up to their enchantment. As Everett McNeil wrote in his October 14, 1923 review of Enchanted Bunnies in the New York Times, “children adore bunnies, even the make-believe ones… [t]his is why the little girls and boys who get Ruth Sawyer’s book, The Tale of the Enchanted Bunnies will themselves be enchanted.”[2]

Illustration of bunnies walking down path surrounded by trees.

Enchanted Bunnies (1923)

The opportunity to freely translate works to help fill the gap in stories available to children in their mother tongue is one reason to celebrate that the Enchanted Bunnies and other 1923 children’s book gems are now in the public domain. While English-speaking children have around 55,000 picture books available to them, there are only 2,000 in Portuguese and a mere 500 in Zulu.[3] Like many of her books, Enchanted Bunnies was inspired by the legends and folk tales that Sawyer gathered from various countries. Now that the book is in the public domain—more than 95 years after its initial publication—it is fitting that it is now free to be translated into any language for children around the world to enjoy.

[1] Chevalier, Tracy (ed.), Twentieth-Century Children’s Writers, St. James Press, 1989, p. 854.
[2] McNeil, Everett, What Became of the Pied Piper, New York Times, Oct. 14, 1923.
[3] For more details, see www.bookhunger.org.

Celebrating New Public Domain Works: “Dice, Brassknuckles & Guitar”

Posted January 22, 2019

We thank Jordyn Ostroff for the following contribution to our blog series, which celebrates works from 1923 that entered the public domain on January 1, 2019. Jordyn is an attorney and a co-author of Understanding Rights Reversion.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
The World’s Work (1921)

One small gem that entered the public domain this year, and should not be overlooked, is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story, “Dice, Brassknuckles & Guitar.” Of all his many short stories, this one—published in 1923 in Hearst’s International—perhaps most clearly foreshadows The Great Gatsby, which was published only a couple of years later.

In the story, a young man from the South arrives in New Jersey with his body servant, in a car that routinely falls apart. When he goes to borrow a hammer from an old mansion nearby, he encounters a young woman and promises to make her a New York society girl. After his plan to drive his old clunker as a taxi in New York fails, he comes up with something more brilliant: the dice, brass knuckles, and guitar academy, open three afternoons a week to all the young debutantes of Southampton. There, James Powell, J.M. (“Jazz Master”) teaches young men and women to defend themselves with “Powell’s defense brassknuckles, débutante’s size,” to play the guitar, and to win a buck at dice.

All of the themes that make The Great Gatsby an American icon are at play: the class divide, racial tension, southern versus northern etiquette, and of course, a rollicking jazz party in the background. There’s even a family in Southampton called the Katzbys, a wink at Fitzgerald’s future work, and an O. Henry-style plot twist or two, which I won’t give away here.

Now that the story is in the public domain, high school students can now more easily access this precursor to the novel many of them are likely already reading in class. Through it, they might catch a glimpse of a great American author using the short story form to figure out his future themes and plots. That said, the story is not without flaws. Like many works of its time, “Dice, Brassknuckles & Guitar” contains offensive racial stereotypes and language. As such, it also provides an occasion for students to grapple with the ugly side of the Jazz Age social scene that Fitzgerald wrote about so memorably, and to better understand his work in the historical context of the 1920s.

Kevin Smith on “Lessons from the ReDigi Decision”

Posted January 18, 2019

The following analysis by Kevin Smith, Dean of Libraries at the University of Kansas, originally appeared on In the Open on January 17 under a CC-BY license. We’re featuring it here to provide some context for the issues surrounding Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) in the wake of the recent decision in Capitol Records v. ReDigi. Authors Alliance’s statement in support of CDL can be read here.

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The decision announced last month in the ReDigi case, more properly known as Capitol Records v. ReDigi, Inc. was, in one sense, at least, not a big surprise. It was never very likely, given the trajectory of recent copyright jurisprudence, that the Second Circuit would uphold a digital first sale right, which is fundamentally what the case is about. The Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling that the doctrine of first sale is only an exception to the distribution right and, therefore, does not protect digital lending because, in that process, new copies of a work are always made. His reasoning pretty much closes the door on any form of digital first sale right, even of the “send and delete” variety that tries to protect against multiple copies of the work being transferred.

What is perhaps more surprising is that the 2nd Circuit also rejected a fair use defense for ReDigi’s system. Some were particularly surprised that fair use was treated so dismissively by Judge Pierre Leval, who is one of the most respected jurists in regard to fair use, and the author of Toward a Fair Use Standard, the article upon which the Supreme Court relied when it transformed fair use thinking in the Campbell v. Acuff-Rose case. For my part, however, I am inclined to be a little less surprised, and to still think that we can learn several things from this decision.

Authors Alliance Submits Comment to U.S. Copyright Office in Support of Registration Modernization

Posted January 17, 2019

Authors Alliance submitted comments in response to the United States Copyright Office’s Notification of Inquiry for Registration Modernization. The Office is building a modernized copyright registration system intended to improve user experience, increase Office efficiency, and decrease processing times. We have written previously about the benefits to authors and the public associated with a robust record of copyright registration, and our Copyright Fundamentals resource page has more information on how and why to register. Our comments therefore support the following proposals:

Make registration more affordable to all copyright owners by considering alternative methods for calculating fees that would provide equity to users and encourage registration;
Build a registration interface that allows users to update rights and permissions information without having to submit a supplementary registration and additional fees;
Accept optional data documenting licensing terms, including information about any applicable public license (such as a Creative Commons license), with a registration application; and
Connect registration and recordation records in order to clarify chain of title information.

In our comments, we also encourage the Office to initiate or commission an empirical study of authors’ views on the advantages of and barriers to registration to evaluate why only a fraction of eligible works are registered. With additional information from authors, the Office could restructure incentives to register copyright claims in order to promote greater participation in the Office’s registration system.

Further details can be found in the full text of our comment. Hover over the document below to view the comment in your browser, or download here.

20190115_RegistrationModernization

Celebrating New Public Domain Works: Audiobooks on Librivox

Posted January 16, 2019

A selection of works that entered the public domain on January 1, 2019
(courtesy of the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain)

This Copyright Week, as we welcome works from 1923 into the public domain, it’s exciting to consider the possibilities for re-using and adapting them to reach new audiences. Once works are free from copyright restrictions, they can be remade, shared, and added to the commons for all to enjoy. One noteworthy resource that is mining these public domain riches is Librivox, a free and volunteer-powered collection of audiobooks, whose mission is nothing less than “acoustical liberation of books in the public domain.”

All books in the Librivox collection are completely free, and accessing them is easy; there’s no app download, sign-in, or subscription required, and works can be listened to online or downloaded. Books are read and quality-checked by volunteers, and the audio files are hosted by the Internet Archive.

There are already some works from 1923 on the site (note that some recordings are complete, while others are still in progress):

Tarzan and the Golden Lion, by Edgar Rice Burroughs (in progress)
A Lost Lady by Willa Cather
Excerpts from Selected Poems by Robert Frost (recordings of the complete collection and Frost’s other 1923 book, New Hampshire, are currently in progress)
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran (in progress)
Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf

Librivox features many other works from authors who were active in the early 1920’s, inlcuding P.G. Wodehouse, Edith Wharton, D.H. Lawrence, and many more. Volunteers can sign up to read books, proof recordings, and suggest new works for the collection. We look forward to hearing more—literally!—as books continue to enter the public domain each January 1. Next year, works first published in 1924—including A Passage to India by E.M. Forster and The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann—will be freely available to adapt into new formats for readers and listeners to enjoy.