Quotation

This is a policy for a small site, not legal advice. The aim is to stay well inside the space that criticism and commentary are allowed — and never to become a library of other people's pages.

What we are doing

Every volume in this catalogue was invented by a real writer, in a real work. The entries here are original criticism: what the imagined book is, why it is interesting as an object, and where a human being can check that we have not made it up.

The quotations are evidence for that criticism. They are not the collection.

What we quote, and how much

We quote from the host work — the novel, story, play, or broadcast in which the imagined book appears. A few lines. A couplet. A sentence or two. Enough to show the voice, not enough to save anyone a trip to the original.

Not a scene. Not a chapter. Not a poem in full. Nabokov prints nine hundred and ninety-nine lines of John Shade; this catalogue quoted two. Orwell gives Winston two chapters of Goldstein; we quoted one sentence and said where the rest lives.

The imagined book itself was never written, so it is not a copyrighted object. The words in the host work that purport to come from it are copyrighted, as part of the host work. We treat them that way, and we attribute them that way.

If the host work is in the public domain, we may quote a little more, and we still do not reprint it. Public domain is not a reason to paste a story. It is a reason not to worry as much about the couplet.

Attribution

Every quotation names the real work, the real author, and the year, with enough of a location — a chapter, a story title — that you can find it. Translations name the translator. An unattributed line does not ship. A line nobody has checked against the page does not ship: we omit it.

Every entry also carries sources. A quotation is not a source. The source is the book you can hold.

Why this is supposed to be allowed

Two doctrines cover a site like this, and they are not the same. In the United Kingdom, fair dealing for criticism or review asks that the work have been published, that the dealing be fair, and that the source be acknowledged. In the United States, fair use weighs purpose, the nature of the work, the amount taken, and the effect on the market.

We are trying to stay well inside both. The purpose is criticism. The amount is small. The source is named. Nothing here replaces the book you would buy or borrow. We cannot promise a court would agree. We can keep the extracts short enough that the question should not arise.

What we will not host

• The full text of any in-copyright work, or a substantial part of one.
• The full text of in-game books. Games are not in the catalogue yet; when they are, the texts stay on the disc.
• Scans, PDFs, or OCR of a published facsimile.
• A “complete” reconstruction of an imagined book, assembled from scattered quotations. That is how a catalogue quietly becomes an anthology.

When an entry is marked extensive excerpts, that means the host work contains long passages. It does not mean we reproduced them. When it is marked published in our world, that means you can buy the thing. It does not mean we posted it.

If you hold the rights

If you hold copyright in a passage quoted here and you want it shortened or removed, say so. This is a sketch of a library, not a hill. We will cut the quotation.

Write to the operator of imaginedlibrary.com. The site is published by the GitHub user j-nilesh.