Getting article content from older hard published resources

I was just brainstorming today, I figure that there are a lot of hard copy resources such as older books, magazine articles, etc. that someone could use to their advantage for putting up on their site. For example, say you are doing an article on a particular car model. You find an old magazine article associated with the car model, copy it down manually, find some keywords to optimize, and post.

Now If this is already taken advantage of, I'm unfamiliar with the method. But I have some questions.

1.) I assume that Google's reach is limited to digital content and hard content that has been digitized. Certainly not all hard resources have been copied to the internet, especially if its older. How likely do you figure that Google wouldn't catch on to something like that, if at all?

2.) If workable, could this be a virtually unlimited resource for "fresh" content? I surmise that you would only have to adjust for keyword optimization and dated information?

Its not Google that you would have to worry about here, what you would have to worry about is copyright issues. If you didn't have to worry about the copyright issues, I'm pretty sure the articles would be indexed by Google.

However you could always take old content and spin it or better still, rewrite it by hand. No google problems and no copyright issues.

Yes, it's definitely a good source of content and you are not the first to think so.

I would go for magazines rather than books as you are far less likely to run into any issues. Books are more likely to be digitized.

Also, magazines that are no longer in circulation will be safer - and the older the better.

As far as sources, try boot sales, garage sales, charity shops and the like.

You will also find people selling job lots of old magazines online and that's a good way of sourcing lots of cheap and niche-specific content.

Before you begin copying the articles, extract a sentence or two from each article and search for them in quotes to find out whether it has been digitized or not. If it hasn't, you are good to go. I recommend though that you rewrite each article before publishing.

How about that, I had no idea. Lol for some reason I'm reminded of sneakernet companies that physically transport large amounts of data since its actually faster to drive terabytes of data somewhere instead of trying to download it. Imagine a sneakernet Facebook lol.

Appreciate the feedback! I don't think my niche has any use for this, but nonetheless a pretty decent idea it seems.

There's also a lot of public domain material. Much of it is old, but still can be useful for some niches such as travel.

In the Public Domain:

1) Published Before 1923
2) 1923 through 1977
Published without a copyright notice
3) 1923 through 1963
Published with notice but copyright was not renewed
4) 1978 to 1 March 1989
Published without notice, and without subsequent registration within 5 years

Source:

This is actually quite common practice among writers. You can also use public domain stuff and avoid the copyright issues.

...Giving away some of my secrets here....
There's a lot of old stuff that is out of copyright and hasn't been digitized. Look for university library collections and run a few sentences through Copyscape. Don't expect to be able to use any major works or authors as they have probably been digitized.

You could use such content preferably by attributing relevant credit to the actual authors.