Public Domain books are great... if you can read the original language. The way books are translated nowadays are much more respectful to the author. Two cases

Public Domain books are great... if you can read the original language. The way books are translated nowadays are much more respectful to the author. Two cases are well-known in France: Charles Baudelaire, who is considered as one of the best French poet ever, has translated some of Edgar Poe's short novels. Well... that's not even a translation, it's his own version. It's still a good reading, a remix of Pie by Baudelaire. More recently, it was discovered that Dostoyevsky had been translated in a very polished way, to meet the bourgeoisie good taste of 100 years ago. Very ancient books, from the Greek and Roman times (e.g. from 500 BC to 500 AD mostly, but Homer has composed his famous poems likely around 800 BC) have arrived to us from multiple sources. Philologists have made huge progress since the most recent translation available in the Public Domain. In the last 30 years, computers have also changed the field: through computation but also simply by making the various "originals" accessible through the internet. This is true as well for the Medieval Age of course. So any translation is always - if not biased - a reflect of its epoch. I majored in History and basically, most academic books are outdated every 30 years or so. That's good since it proves progress. The art of translation and the science of philology progress as well. We need to shorten the period before a book becomes Public Domain. In France, it's 70 years after the death of the author(s) AND the translator(s). That's too long.