Rescuing Australia’s lost literary treasures

From Pursuit by The University of Melbourne:

Have you ever gone looking for a particular book and discovered it can’t be found for love nor money?

If so, that’s no surprise. Most Australian books written are now out-of-print and unavailable to readers.

When books go out of print, authors usually have the right to reclaim their copyrights. But what then? Digitising books is expensive, and authors who make that investment and start selling them online (via Amazon, for example) often find that they sink without a trace.

And they can’t make them available in libraries, because those licensing arrangements are all built to go through publishers.

In a new collaboration between authors, libraries and researchers, we’re setting out to change all that.

Untapped: the Australian Literary Heritage Project is creating the infrastructure necessary to rescue Australia’s lost literary treasures and bring them properly back to life.

Working with a national team of library collections experts, we’re building a list of culturally-important lost books, then working with authors to digitise them, license them into libraries, and make them available for sale.

read more here @ Pursuit by The University of Melbourne