Over 300 Books Are Available for Free Download in the Getty Museum’s Virtual Library
Winter is almost officially here, so why not cozy up with one of these books.
via HYPERALLERGIC
Launched in 2014, the Getty Museum’s Virtual Library is a publicly accessible catalog of Getty titles that, for the most part, are no longer readily available in physical form.
“As a publisher, when you run out of copies of a book you can basically either reprint it and keep selling it, or you can retire the title, declaring it out of print,” said Greg Albers, Digital Publications Manager for Getty Publications, in an email interview with Hyperallergic. “If it doesn’t make financial sense to reprint and the book goes out of print, the original author or another publisher may choose to pick up the reins and publish a new edition, but more often than not, the book will just sort of disappear. This isn’t a fate anyone wants to see for their books and luckily at the Getty, a decidedly mission-driven organization, we were able to pursue an alternate option. We worked though some legal/copyright issues and released PDFs of the original books, for anyone to read and download, 100% for free.”