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Standard Ebooks Public Domain Day 2025 in Literature
- isaacfrond 2y agoLet me recommend from this list: The seven dials mystery https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/agatha-christie/the-seven-dials-mystery https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/agatha-christie/the-seven-...
- fl4tul4 2y agoPeople take this list and create e-books to charge at Kindle Store, so people unaware of the fact they are public end up wasting money away.
- cafeinux 2y agoNon-technical people that have a Kindle e-reader might not know how to find and load books from elsewhere. Even non-technical people that don't have a Kindle but just default to Amazon's store for all things ebook might not know how to find books elsewhere (apart from the big names). In the end, if a free version exists on the Kindle store, it's up to them to choose the free version instead.
- robin_reala 2y agoI contributed The Dain Curse production to this list. The era of the hard boiled detective is just starting to come into the US public domain, hope you enjoy it.
- peterpost2 2y agoStandard ebooks is pure class.
- aaron695 2y ago[flagged]
- pixelmonkey 2y agoSuch a great project. Cool to know that one of my favorite authors, Sinclair Lewis, now has all his popular novels starting to enter the Public Domain. I had only just recently started reading "Dodsworth" so I'll now switch to the Standard EBooks version!
- HexDecOctBin 2y agoAre there resources like Project Gutenberg or Standard Ebooks for other languages and countries? Especially non-Eurocentric ones?
- robin_reala 2y agoFor Gutenberg, there are a few. https://runeberg.org/ https://runeberg.org/ is my local version. For Standard Ebooks, there have definitely been some attempts in the past, but getting traction has historically been difficult it seems. I’m pretty sure I saw a Spanish equivalent at one point with a decent sized library though.
- antirez 2y agoFor Italian there is liber liber but I don't like how it is run at all. They claim copyright for the cleaning process to produce the ebook: this basically is both illegal in Italy, afaik, and ruins the whole goal of the project.
- goosedragons 2y agoFor Japan/Japanese there is Aozora. They have out of copyright and public domain books.
- wahnfrieden 2y agoAny newly public Japanese texts?
- bentley 2y agoThere are none. Japan is in the midst of a 20‐year public domain drought (2019–2038), like the US from 1999–2018 and Canada from 2023–2042, because they extended the copyright duration from life+50 to life+70 due to pressure from the EU. Aozora Bunko does receive new public domain works, but only ones whose copyrights had already expired by 2018.
- wahnfrieden 2y ago
- tetris11 2y agoThese books have been in the public domain for decades in all countries east of Germany
- robin_reala 2y agoNot sure what you’re basing that on? Faulkner (for example) died in 1962, so we’re still eight years away from his work arriving in the public domain in EU states and most other countries globally.
- apetresc 2y agoHow does this work? Asking legitimately. If an American author produces a work in America, with presumably an American copyright, don't USA laws decide when they enter the public domain? Like, could some country just decide global copyright ends after 1 year after publication in their jurisdiction, and start printing their own copies of Harry Potter or whatever?
- robin_reala 2y agoYes, that’s how it works. But most countries are signatories of the Berne Convention which sets a minimum 50-years-after-death copyright length, and have mostly settled on 70-years-after-death. This includes the US, but it wasn’t retroactively applied, so the old 95-years-after-publishing regime remains in place for works published before 1976. That’s why these twenty works were all published in 1929.
- tame3902 2y agoThere was a court case about this. Project Gutenberg got sued by a German publishing house for hosting works still copyrighted in Germany. "Although they were in the public domain in the United States, the German court (Frankfurt am Main Regional Court) recognized the infringement of copyrights still active in Germany, and asserted that the Project Gutenberg website was under German jurisdiction because it hosts content in the German language and is accessible in Germany." [1] Project Gutenberg lost repeatedly in court but the whole saga ended with a settlement. "Under the terms of the agreement, Project Gutenberg eBooks by the three authors will be blocked from Germany until their German copyright expires." [1] So if you have a German IP you can't access the ebooks, but if don't you can read them. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gutenberg#Copyright https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gutenberg#Copyright
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- acabal 2y agoEditor in chief here, happy to answer any questions!
- voisin 2y agoNo questions, but wanted to thank you for doing what you’re doing. It has been a while since I checked in on Standard Ebooks and my gosh it has grown! Congratulations and thank you!