image credit: andresmh via flickr (cc)
While the logical way to make most books conveniently available to more people is to greatly reduce the scope and duration of the copy-prevention privilege known as “copyright,” another approach is to buy books their freedom, one-by-one. This seems to be the approach of Unglue.it. They use a crowd-funding approach to pay privilege-holders for a creative-commons license, which essentially makes the book available to all if enough people are willing to donate enough money. Certainly better than nothing and perhaps it will prove fruitful.
To date they seem to have ransomed three books in this way, tho their web site doesn’t tell us how much they paid, with four ongoing campaigns seeking to raise between $1,000 and $25,000.