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Scanned Images From Old Books - Now on CD-ROM!

Over 1700 high-resolution public domain images scanned from old books! Most of them are available in multiple sizes: look for 306x802 (180K) by the side of the thumbnails to see the different sizes.

The images on the DVD are mostly public domain, so you can do whatever you like with them. The collection of images is copyright; I've spent a long time selecting them, and it would be sad if you started making copies of the DVD yourself and selling them. Of course, if you want permission to do that, just ask. I'll want a link back, so that people can find out more about the images.

So, you can print the images, you can put them on your web site, you can use them as screen backgrounds, print tee-shirts from them, grind them up and eat them, or make socks out of them. Or anything else. There's no warranty, except that if the DVD doesn't work I'll refund your money, of course, and/or send a replacement.

Some of the images are copyrighted, and you can see that from the HTML description that does with each image. In that case you may need to ask for permission to use the image. The permissions on the DVD are the same as those on this Web site, so you can check online if you want.

The DVD costs CAD$35 within Canada, US$35 anywhere in the US, or £20 in the UK; shipping is extra, at cost. It can take me up to a month to ship a DVD, because I travel a lot; if it's going to be more than a week or two I'll let you know. You can pay me with paypal, or send a UK, US or Canadian cheque or money order.

The DVD contains the oldbooks directory pretty much as you see it, complete with thumbnail HTML pages and high resolution versions. Most images are greyscale or colour JPEGs. I also have the raw PNG scans for many images, but right now that's a ten DVD collection!

If there are any other specific images you would like on the DVD, or you'd like more details about any of the books, just ask and I'll see what I can do.

Obviously, if you put the whole DVD on the web, it will be full of links to fromoldbooks, like this one. You probably don't want to do that. If you want to mirror the images, though, just let me know. Many of the internal links are absolute, to work around bugs in search engine crawlers.

Donating Books or Money

I've been collecting old books as a hobby for 15 or 20 years now, but illustrated ones are often more expensive. If you have old books that you don't want any more, and would like to see them scanned, let me know. They need to be out of copyright, which generally means that the author (and illustrator) died more than 70 years ago if the book was published in the UK. For the US it means that the book was published during or before 1922 (or sometimes later, depending on whether its copyright was renewed), and for Canada 75 years after publication, or 50 years after the author/illustrator's death. Always scan (or transcribe) the title page, although the imprint page is sometimes also needed.

Some people might want to send me money. The easiest way to do that is to use PayPal:

Some people might want to send pictures of themselves barefoot in a forest. That's fine, I like that a lot actually, but it doesn't pay the mortgage.

Contacting Liam

I am Liam at holoweb dot net; let me know if you'd like me to scan specific images, or higher resolution copies, or have any interesting uses for these images, or like them. Tell me what colour socks you are wearing, e.g. socks: black, in the subject line, to get past my spam filters.