William Wrede full books online

Thanks to Wieland Willker on Synoptic-L for the note that William Wrede's classic Das Messiasgeheimnis in den Evangelien; Zugleich ein Beitrag zum Verständnis des Markusevangeliums (1901) is now available online at archive.org:

Das Messiasgeheimnis in den Evangelien
As usual with archive.org, you can download as PDF, read online in flipbook format and so on.

Also available on archive.org are Wrede's Paulus and The Origin of the New Testament. The latter is also now available on Google Books in toto, including for download as a Google ebook, so you can even read it on your phone:

The Origin of the New Testament

For earlier comments on the availability (and non-availability in some places) of the English translation of Paulus, Paul, see comments over on the NT Gateway blog and here on the NT Blog.

The Bizarre Case of Google Books Unavailable Outside the U.S.

Over on the NT Gateway blog, I noted yesterday that William Wrede's Paul is now available in toto on Google Books. Accordingly, I added a link to the Paul: Books and Articles page. But then it appeared that a lot of people were unable to access the book. In comments, Holger Szesnat, my colleague on the NT Gateway, noted:

In my experience, most google books that are available in full view in the U.S.A. are not accessible outside of that country. I don’t even get ’snippet’ view of the ET of Wrede’s book. The publication date seems to make no difference. Particularly galling when, as I once noticed, a scan had been made at the Bodleian library in Oxford, but UK web visitors would be prevented from accessing the google book scan. Even worse when you live on the other side of the globe, with absolute no way of reading that book.

One thing that U.S.-based people can do though is this: download the google books PDF, and then upload it to archive.org – from where it is accessible to anyone. So much for google’s supposed copyright concern behind all this, incidentally. The German original is available on that site already: http://www.archive.org/details/pauluswred00wred

The rest of us (i.e. those who do not live in google-land) can use proxy servers like hotspot shield to get around the problem – as long as you are prepared to put up with slow speed and annoying advertisements.

Well, this was news to me. I am really surprised that books like this, over one hundred years old, are not showing up in some countries. I realize, of course, that copyright laws differ from country to country. Nevertheless, I am curious to know how widespread this kind of difference between Google Books at home and abroad is. Anyone else experienced this?

Now, if anyone would like to upload the PDF of Wrede's book to archive.org, it would be great to hear from you. As an interim measure, I have uploaded the PDF to my web space here:

W. Wrede, Paul (translated by E. W. Lummis; London: Philip Green, 1907) [PDF]

Update (14.01): Roger Pearse comments.