I am looking for a public domain (original text published before 1923) of the complete Latin text of Livy’s Ab urbe condita. There is the one at the Latin Library, but I am quite certain that there must be better versions of the text somewhere. There is also the one at Perseus (Müller/Weissenborn), but I am unsure whether one is allowed to download the entire text (let alone how that is to be done).
I have already read the thread Unabridged Latin texts with notes, but I was none the wiser after that. What I am looking for, is the complete Latin text, in a good digital public domain edition, so that I can fiddle around with it (e. g. add vocabulary using Collatinus) without having to fear the copyright “gestapo”, should I upload it somewhere. Any suggestions?
In Perseus, you can display the whole text of each book by clicking on “View text chunked by: book” in the left sidebar. Then you can copy-paste. You can also download the XML version at the bottom of the page, if you know how to parse it.
Perseus publishes their works under a Creative Commons License, so it’s not public domain, but you should be able to use it as you like. See the notice at the bottom of the page.
The quality of Perseus texts is variable. In some authors I have encountered numerous typos. I don’t know about this one in particular.
Thank you for the CC-License hint. I have completely missed it. I’ll give the XML-version a try. Python seems to have a module dealing with this sort of thing.
I’m not sure if you’re still looking for a copy, but Archive dot org has many copies of Livy. They’re all (?) scanned with OCR, so I’m not sure how many errors there are in the text files. Might be worth poking around there if you still need one.