An excellent set of (re)search methods, many of which I'm well familiar. A few notes and additions:<p>- There are numerous public-domain full-text archives, including Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive, and many small specialised library collections (usually focused on a given topic, e.g., Online Library of Liberty). Less useful for post-1925 materials, but often high-quality renderings (either scans or proofread re-typeset / typed-in documents) available. Google Books also allows full PDF downloads for public-domain works, generally.<p>- NYPL's Secretly Public Domain project has been reviewing copyright renewal records to find works published <i>since</i> 1923, and before 1964, whose copyright was never renenwed. Other projects (Internet Archive notably) have been flagging these works as being in the public domain, and hence freed of any download restrictions.<p><a href="https://www.nypl.org/blog/2019/05/31/us-copyright-history-1923-1964" rel="nofollow">https://www.nypl.org/blog/2019/05/31/us-copyright-history-19...</a><p><a href="https://www.nypl.org/blog/2018/03/30/unlocking-record-american-creativity" rel="nofollow">https://www.nypl.org/blog/2018/03/30/unlocking-record-americ...</a><p>- OpenLibrary / Internet Archive increasingly have current under-copyright books available for at least 1hr and up to 14 day loan. The reader is less elegant than it had been in past, but is viable.<p>- HathiTrust is all but useless with its download restrictions. It's helpful to determine if records exist.<p>- Worldcat gets only a brief mention by Gwern. It's a union catalog (a combined library catalog of a vast number of libraries worldwide), of books, articles, and other document types, and is an excellent way of determining <i>if</i> a book exists, what an author's output is, and/or the documents within a given search space. !worldcat DDG bang search, "ti:" is title, "au:" is author, "kw:" is keyword. Space any colons (":") occurring within search terms, or omit them entirely. You'll still have to either find the digital record elsewhere, or track down a library, but quite useful.<p>- You can save online materials to the Internet Archive using the 'save' URL:<p><pre><code> https://web.archive.org/save/<original_url>
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So to save this particular HN discussion we'd specify:<p><pre><code> https://web.archive.org/save/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26847596
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You can submit that through any HTTP client (curl, wget, lynx, w3m, your GUI browser, etc.). Requests can be trivially scripted and batched.<p>This is ... documented somewhere (I stumbled across it myself), though I'm not finding the specifics. Related "save page now" functionality is mentioned here: <a href="https://blog.archive.org/2019/10/23/the-wayback-machines-save-page-now-is-new-and-improved/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.archive.org/2019/10/23/the-wayback-machines-sav...</a><p>- Motorised paper cutters are available at some photocopy shops. Inquire as to whether or not you can have books debinded by them. (Generally anything resembling paper is fine, though the blades can be damaged by metal or other materials.)