Secret of the old mill post script.

This is sort of a follow up to last weeks post and yesterdays subsequent re edit of said post, about the original editions of the Hardy Boys detective series. 

I've decided to have a look and see if there are any pdfs or ebooks for download, and it seems that there are, sort of.  There are places where you can get the whole series or so as PDF files these are the late 50's reprints and are a good place to start.  I will warn you though that they seem  to have been formatted by an actual ape, such is the poor job they've done with it.  Chapter headings occurring throughout the story and some weird formatting makes it a chore to read. 

Worse some of the original stories are missing, this includes the original Secret of the Old mill, so it looks like I'm forced to type out a version from my own copy, and that's not getting me stated on tracking down the original version either via Amazon or EBay.

Looking at copyright here it seems to be a cluster fuck of differing lengths depending entirely on locale.  It covers ghost written works too so these books are totally covered.  Its 70 years here and 90 in the US, meaning nothing ever goes out of copyright, ever.  Which means depending on what version you have it maybe out of copyright or within the next 20 - 200 or so years.

In other words the:

*Short version if you're US based an would like a massive touch typing exercise and have access to a lot of Hardy Boys book including the original versions, then you could take on this exercise in futility and put a good quality copy out there for us.

*Long version is the Byuu option.  I track down and buy any of the original versions I can get, or at least will ship to us here in the UK.  Clean up the formatting of the PDF. files of what I have and then transcribe them out word for word in Libreoffice and host them somewhere for people  to download.  I have all the European releases and a few of the American releases too. 

*The other, other option is to grab the ebook files which is also going to be expensive, and is at the whims of the originals being deleted at any time. That is of course the worst ever option as I hate digital only, propriety media.

Comment below if you think this is a worthwile endeavour, or even a fools errand.