A lot of books published before 1964 in the United States are out of copyright: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_renewal_in_the_United_States https://en

A lot of books published before 1964 in the United States are out of copyright: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_renewal_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_renewal_in_the_Unite... Works published before 1964 in the US are all in the public domain, excepting only those for which a renewal was registered with the US Copyright Office. Relatively few works from this era have had their copyrights renewed. A US Copyright Office study in 1961 found that fewer than 15% of registered copyrights had been renewed. Google Books, last time I looked, applied a blanket year-based cutoff rule and did not allow full view access to these works that failed to renew their copyrights, unless publishers explicitly opted in. Other institutions like the Internet Archive and HathiTrust have put more work into determining the copyright status of individual pre-1964 works and opening the public domain works up for full view. https://www.hathitrust.org/copyright https://www.hathitrust.org/copyright