6 ms·

Standard Ebooks: Public Domain Day 2026 in Literature

382 points by WithinReason 9mo ago

robin_reala 9mo ago
I’m a contributor – I did Kafka’s The Castle, Agatha Christie’s Giant’s Bread, and Stella Benson’s The Faraway Bride for this launch – and I’m happy to answer any questions about Standard Ebooks.
- fxbois 9mo ago
  Do you plan to provide PDF ?
  - cess11 9mo ago
    I don't know their reasons but PDF is a rather problematic format so I suspect that's why. You can run their EPUB through Pandoc to convert yourself, or put some effort in and setup your own Calibre instance which will do something similar when you ask it to.
  - dajare 9mo ago
    SE makes ebooks available in four formats: "compatible" epub; "advanced" epub; kobo-compatible ("kepub"); and kindle ("azw3"). No PDFs. One of the SE editors experimented with turning SE ebooks into PDFs, though. See more about that here: https://groups.google.com/g/standardebooks/c/Xy2bwiexLeM/m/fgk5UmyVAAAJ https://groups.google.com/g/standardebooks/c/Xy2bwiexLeM/m/f...
- as1mov 9mo ago
  Probably a dumb question, but how do you guys decide (and source) the book covers? I love how they look, but as a philistine can't put into words why. Also thanks for doing this, I've read a bunch of stuff (GK Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, Dashiell Hammett) that I wouldn't have otherwise if it weren't for this service.
  - robin_reala 9mo ago
    The historical criteria is fine-art style oil painting. These days we’re starting to use first-edition cover art a bunch for more modern productions if it’s good quality. We also tend to use abstract oil paintings for sci-fi.[1] Obviously, all art is sourced from the public domain too. We’ve also started a database of confirmed-US-PD artwork that we can use for future productions.[2] [1] https://standardebooks.org/subjects/science-fiction https://standardebooks.org/subjects/science-fiction [2] https://standardebooks.org/artworks https://standardebooks.org/artworks
  - acabal 9mo ago
    As Robin mentioned the typical style is "fine art oil painting", with some wiggle room allowed for exceptionally difficult cases (like Asian-themed books, as there just wasn't much fine art on that subject pre-1930). We also require that the art have some kind of connection to the book itself, so it's not just some random fine art. Sometimes the connection is a little fuzzy, but we do the best we can given that art must be pre-1930 and also must have been previously published. (My personal favorite artwork selection of the books I worked on is The Communist Manifesto[1]. That painting was actually made specifically for a different book by Willa Cather[2], but I thought the peasant laborer, holding a sickle in one hand, with a faraway look in her eyes as the red sun rises behind her was just too good to pass up for Marx!) 1920ish was when it started becoming much more common for books to have illustrated dust jackets, so now that more books from that era and onwards are entering the public domain, we opt to use the first edition dust jacket if it's in the appropriate style. Fortunately for us, that era also happens to be the so-called Golden Age of Illustration so it's not hard finding beautiful art to use! [1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/karl-marx_friedrich-engels/the-communist-manifesto/samuel-moore https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/karl-marx_friedrich-engels... [2] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/willa-cather/the-song-of-the-lark https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/willa-cather/the-song-of-t...
- pastage 9mo ago
  Do you think the things that makes an edition special goes missing while converting to e.g. Standard Ebooks. I remember both the The Castle and Das Schloss like they had typesetting that helped me in perceiving the feel of the book. Is there anyway to preserve that feeling and still keep within the bounds of standardisation you adhere to? (I did a quick look through my copy and it does not seem to be much that makes it unique really, just the size of the book, and the chapter heading graphics..) Do you know if the project try to look at other languages at all?
  - robin_reala 9mo ago
    Nothing particularly in The Castle, from my production of it. As this was not previously PD there wasn’t any Gutenberg (or other) transcription available, so I did my own from the OCR of the original scans. A large part of the feel of the work, to me at least, comes from the extreme sentence / paragraph lengths though. We do have a default typography across all our works (the “Standard” in “Standard Ebooks” refers to a standard imprint; think Penguin) but we usually retain specific famous things where possible in a reflowable format. For example, the Mouse’s Tail in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,[1] or the letter in E. A. Poe’s “Thou Art the Man”.[2] We don’t take on other languages, no. Our tooling[3] and style guides[4] are tailored specifically to English. Absolutely nothing stopping another project from forking the codebase (it’s GPL-3) and giving it a go. [1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/lewis-carroll/alices-adventures-in-wonderland/john-tenniel/text/chapter-3#:~:text=the%20tale%20was%20something%20like%20this https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/lewis-carroll/alices-adven... [2] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/edgar-allan-poe/short-fiction/text/thou-art-the-man#:~:text=the%20following%20letter https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/edgar-allan-poe/short-fict... [3] https://github.com/standardebooks/tools https://github.com/standardebooks/tools [4] https://standardebooks.org/manual/ https://standardebooks.org/manual/
  - hopelite 9mo ago
    It seems you may be making assumptions that the formatting and typesetting of any particular edition were intentional or even deliberate on the part of the author, not any number of people, from editors to printers, who could and would have influenced those things for various reasons. Something I am rather familiar with is brought out by your mention of the German edition/title; that the continental market seems to generally produce books that are far more densely formatted, i.e., smaller font and typesetting, thinner pages, and leading to overall tighter book formats. I actually appreciate it when, e.g., a book is 1/2 the size and weight, and usually also made far more durably; but it will invariably compromise any author intention related to the arrangement of the lettering. Maybe you can confirm that based on what seems to be your English and German editions of the same novel.
- me_jumper 9mo ago
  I could not find out if there are outstanding todos that I could assign myself to as a newcomer. I'd like to contribute, but don't know where to start. Is there an issue board somewhere with missing books, or something else?
  - robin_reala 9mo ago
    Yep! Have a look at our contribution page that lists a bunch of different options, including a list of good first books. https://standardebooks.org/contribute https://standardebooks.org/contribute
  - acabal 9mo ago
    We have a list of wanted ebooks here: https://standardebooks.org/contribute/wanted-ebooks https://standardebooks.org/contribute/wanted-ebooks First-time contributors should select something from the appropriate section, because that gives you the greatest chance of succeeding and the least burden on our reviewers as you get started. Our toolset has a help wanted section and some outstanding issues: https://github.com/standardebooks/tools#help-wanted https://github.com/standardebooks/tools#help-wanted
- Kerrick 9mo ago
  How did you get these ready for release on Public Domain Day without breaking copyright law during the production process? I am not a lawyer, so I have only a surface understanding.
  - robin_reala 9mo ago
    I’m not based in the US and have no intention of travelling there, so I don’t count myself in much danger for US copyright law. Regardless, my understanding of copyright is that people broadly get annoyed when you infringe by distribution. In this case the distribution didn’t happen until the copyright had expired. People preparing these projects for later launch do it purely on their own machines, and nothing arrives at Standard Ebooks until the day of release.
    - sgc 9mo ago
      It would be close to impossible to demonstrate loss, which is always highly relevant in copyright suits (not a lawyer, but I have scanned and digitized hundreds of thousands of pages at https://CatholicLibrary.org https://CatholicLibrary.org and read up on the topic over the years).
- jez 9mo ago
  What’s the approach to embedding fonts in standard ebooks’ epubs? Curious whether there’s a set of fonts that producers are allowed to embed in finished books, or whether there’s project consciously avoids embedding fonts, and if so why. I tried to find a policy page on this via a standardebooks.org site search but nothing looked relevant. I’m asking after realizing that some of my favorite books were books where the ebook had intentional font choices, for example different fonts for chapter titles vs body text, fonts that matched the vibe of the book (historical, more modern, etc.) It would be nice if more ebook readers made it easy to import more than the ~8 fonts they include by default but the next best thing is when the book itself includes a great font.
  - acabal 9mo ago
    The ebooks we produce are entirely in the US public domain, including metadata and any other files. Unfortunately there are basically no good fonts released under the CC0 license. (Most open fonts are released under the OFL license, which is not the same.) Therefore we don't embed any font files, except for Standard Blackletter[1] when necessary, which is a font we developed especially for our use based on public domain specimens, and released via the CC0 license. [1] https://github.com/standardebooks/standard-blackletter https://github.com/standardebooks/standard-blackletter
- NoMoreNicksLeft 9mo ago
  >and I’m happy to answer any questions about Standard Ebooks. When will they start assigning catalog numbers to each of their works in the way that Project Guteneberg does? I'd like a unique id per ebook and since you don't (for obvious reasons) use ISBNs, there's nothing really to be done. I can't use an OCLC id because Standard Ebooks aren't consistently listed in Worldcat, I can't use Bookbrainz or Open Library ids for the same reason. It costs nothing and is a low-effort fix. It's been an industry (and library science) thing for decades or longer. Can Standard Ebooks finally stop the amateur hour crap?
  - acabal 9mo ago
    I know you griped about this in a different thread, but we won't be doing that, sorry. You can uniquely identify an ebook and its version by using dc:identifier in combination with dcterms:modified in the metadata file. If you desperately need a filesystem-safe string then concatenate those two and sha it.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 9mo ago
      [flagged]
- pastor_williams 9mo ago
  Why don't the ebooks include any of the original illustrations? This makes the children's books in particular very unattractive.
  - robin_reala 9mo ago
    We do include illustrations, but in fairly defined categories: when they’re factually illustrative, when they’re graphs or charts, when they’re part of the plot (an illustration of a clue in a murder mystery, for example), or when they’re referenced from the text. The last point is why the Beatrix Potter compilation I did ended up with illustrations: the text specifically references the illustrations in a couple of the books (“Can you see…?”) so they remained. It did mean writing 602 pieces of alt text though[1] so it was a fairly major undertaking to include them. [1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/beatrix-potter/short-fiction/text/loi https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/beatrix-potter/short-ficti...
- asveikau 9mo ago
  What kind of features does "advanced epub" provide that "compatible epub" cannot?
  - robin_reala 9mo ago
    Our projects are built with the broad assumption that the latest tech is supported across the board: the “advanced epub” is generated by zipping that up and renaming it to .epub. The build step then runs the book through a compatibility pass to remove some of the functionality that simply isn’t there in many readers. For example, it: 1. renders the cover as a JPG from the native SVG 2. converts more complicated selectors (e.g. :nth-of-type, :empty, etc.) to classes and class selectors 3. renders MathML as images 4. renders SVGs as images …and a bunch more things to make it work better with older ereaders, which tend hang around for a long time. It’s worth pointing out that the Kobo builds are closer to the “advanced” build as they have great native support for MathML and SVG. But the build step adds in a bunch of Kobo-specific markup to make it work better there. In my experience, Apple Books does the best with the advanced builds, but it doesn’t support SVG covers so you end up with autogenerated ones, which seems a shame. I’ve sent a couple of feedback issues to them over the years, but if anyone else wants to also do this feel free.
- htunnicliff 9mo ago
  Have any public library systems ever tried to partner with Standard Ebooks to help improve the discoverability and accessibility of classics for ebook users? It would be neat to see those editions show up in when browsing collections in apps like Libby or Overdrive (at least in the U.S.).
  - acabal 9mo ago
    No, none have reached out yet. I've had some brief, high-level discussion along those lines with some people in the library industry, and the conclusion I drew is that public libraries in the US are highly fragmented in terms of technological capability. Instead of partnering with individual local library systems, it would make the most sense to - as you mentioned - partner with Overdrive. But there's been no movement in that direction. If anyone from Overdrive is reading, get in touch :)
kopirgan 9mo ago
Does the movie Maltese Falcon too enter public domain?
- robin_reala 9mo ago
  There are two (1931 and 1941), but no: a movie is its own work. It’s the same with translations.
  - kopirgan 9mo ago
    Thanks. Was referring to the Bogart version.
    - robin_reala 9mo ago
      It’ll arrive in the US public domain in 2037, so a little wait.
nairboon 9mo ago
That's a great project! I have a hypothesis that we're getting closer to a cultural inflection point (maybe half a decade out). With every year, more important and very high-quality cultural artifacts enter the public domain, while at the same time, many low quality artefacts are produced (... AI slop). It'll be increasingly difficult to choose a good cultural artefict for consumption (e.g., which book to read next or which movie to watch). A very good indicator for quality is time and thus a useful filter. In some years we could have the following: a netflix-like (legal variant of popcorntime) software system (p2p) that serves high-quality public domain movies, for those who like it, even with AI upscaling or post processing. The same would also work for books, with this pipeline: Project Gutenberg -> Standard Ebooks. At the inflection point, there would be a steady stream of high-quality formats of high-quality content, enough to satisfy the demand of cultural consumption. You wouldn't need the latest book/movie anymore, except for interest in contemporary stuff.
- carlosjobim 9mo ago
  You don't have to wait. You can borrow, purchase, or pirate any books you want.
1313ed01 9mo ago
It would be interesting to see a combined list taking into account both US "1930 or older" rule and more common internationally "life+70" rule, to see what works have finally escaped both of those and make works a bit less unsafe to make use of, but I have not seen any list like that?
- hopelite 9mo ago
  That sounds like a good project for you then
  - hopelite 9mo ago
    Apparently it’s not a good project for you
- wongarsu 9mo ago
  If you have a list of life+70 works, filtering that for works released before 1931 is pretty straight forward The more difficult part of any such list is the editorial decision which works to include. Even if we only cared about books published in English that would be thousands of books each year
hindustanuday 9mo ago
[dead]
idoubtit 9mo ago
The title makes it look like Public Domain is universal, while the article does mention that this list is only about the USA. > On January 1, 2026, books published in 1930 enter the U.S. public domain. The Copyright laws are different in each country, and it's a non-sense in the modern world. A few years ago, I was searching for books written by Alexandra David-Neel. I found them on a Canadian (IIRC) website, but downloads were filtered by geo-IP, since what was in the public domain there was not yet public in France. One of the books I wanted was written before 1900, and not in print since then. Yet the author died in 1969, aged 100, so the French Public Domain for her works will start in 2040. Another example: "As I lay dying" by William Faulkner is now Public Domain in the USA. It was Public Domain in Canada from 2013 to 2023. Then the law changed, and the copyright was extended by 20 years, and reinstated for this book until 2032 — which is 70 years after the author's death in 1962.
- zozbot234 9mo ago
  AIUI the Canadian law change did not reinstate copyright status for works that had lapsed into the public domain, though it did extend duration of existing copyright.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
apwheele 9mo ago
Off topic, but one thing I wish I could do is donate a single copy epub I have the rights to to all libraries. It should be technically possible (many of the places I have lived the local library uses Overdrive).
- Thorrez 9mo ago
  Ownership of digital files is a murky domain. When you say you have the rights to it, you might only have the right to read it, not to give it to anyone else. What was the license text when you bought it?
  - apwheele 9mo ago
    Oh to be clear, these are books I own the copyright to (published through my own imprint).
    - stockresearcher 9mo ago
      This is a group that gets independent author ebooks into public libraries. Perhaps contact them to find out how to do it: https://indieauthorproject.com/authors/ https://indieauthorproject.com/authors/
      - dhosek 9mo ago
        It seems like Hoopla does a lot of self-published and indie published books. That kind of fits in with their business model where they charge a flat fee per lending of the book, so they have an incentive to get as many books on the platform as possible.
con 9mo ago
I built a small app that includes Standard Ebooks and Gutenberg ebooks for personal library management (and send to Kindle): https://scriptwerk.com https://scriptwerk.com Hopefully this makes discovery of books easier and lets people manage their libraries online - I like Calibre, but it is not great for people who are just getting started.
raudette 9mo ago
Related: for fun over the holidays, I created an ePub of a paperback copy of "I Brought The Ages Home", by Charles T. Currelly, which went out of copyright in Canada in 2007 (copyright in Canada changed from 50 to 70 years after the death of the author in 2022, but this did not affect works that were already in the public domain). I couldn't find a ebook online, so I found an old paperback copy and created one: https://www.hotelexistence.ca/create-epub-from-paperback/ https://www.hotelexistence.ca/create-epub-from-paperback/ Charles T. Currelly was like a real-life Indiana Jones, he was the first director of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and sourced much of its early collections. Even with modern OCR (I used Mistral's here), and a book with limited formatting, it's funny how hours of touch-ups are required just to get a glitch-free reading experience (no stray headers, paragraphs, page numbers sprinkled through the text).
- igravious 9mo ago
  This is the often unappreciated selfless that benefits all. Thank you
ChrisArchitect 9mo ago
Related: Happy Public Domain Day 2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46460440 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46460440 What will enter the public domain in 2026? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46117112 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46117112
thangalin 9mo ago
Standard Ebooks produces exceptional quality documents. Here's my comparison against similar projects: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/04/11/project-gutenberg-projects/ https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/04/11/project-gutenberg-p...
- dajare 9mo ago
  Somehow I stumbled across your post/series back in 2020, and that was my first introduction to Standard Ebooks. Now, these years later, I've produced >60 SE titles, and read many, many more. Needless to say, I'm greatly in your debt! :)
pncnmnp 9mo ago
Happy Public Domain Day, everyone! Such a great project. A bit tangential here, but I am really looking forward to 2035 for the public domain. A ton of culturally significant works seem to enter then - And Then There Were None, Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Batman (Detective Comics #27), Superman #1, Marvel Comics #1, and Tintin’s King Ottokar’s Sceptre. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2035_in_public_domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2035_in_public_domain Wikipedia also tells me that all of the 'life + 70" countries will have Ian Fleming's James Bond works in the public domain in 2035 as well.
erlkoenig 9mo ago
[dead]

382 points by WithinReason 9mo ago

I’m a contributor – I did Kafka’s The Castle, Agatha Christie’s Giant’s Bread, and Stella Benson’s The Faraway Bride for this launch – and I’m happy to answer any questions about Standard Ebooks.

fxbois 9mo ago
Do you plan to provide PDF ?
- cess11 9mo ago
  I don't know their reasons but PDF is a rather problematic format so I suspect that's why. You can run their EPUB through Pandoc to convert yourself, or put some effort in and setup your own Calibre instance which will do something similar when you ask it to.
- dajare 9mo ago
  SE makes ebooks available in four formats: "compatible" epub; "advanced" epub; kobo-compatible ("kepub"); and kindle ("azw3"). No PDFs. One of the SE editors experimented with turning SE ebooks into PDFs, though. See more about that here: https://groups.google.com/g/standardebooks/c/Xy2bwiexLeM/m/fgk5UmyVAAAJ https://groups.google.com/g/standardebooks/c/Xy2bwiexLeM/m/f...
as1mov 9mo ago
Probably a dumb question, but how do you guys decide (and source) the book covers? I love how they look, but as a philistine can't put into words why. Also thanks for doing this, I've read a bunch of stuff (GK Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, Dashiell Hammett) that I wouldn't have otherwise if it weren't for this service.
- robin_reala 9mo ago
  The historical criteria is fine-art style oil painting. These days we’re starting to use first-edition cover art a bunch for more modern productions if it’s good quality. We also tend to use abstract oil paintings for sci-fi.[1] Obviously, all art is sourced from the public domain too. We’ve also started a database of confirmed-US-PD artwork that we can use for future productions.[2] [1] https://standardebooks.org/subjects/science-fiction https://standardebooks.org/subjects/science-fiction [2] https://standardebooks.org/artworks https://standardebooks.org/artworks
- acabal 9mo ago
  As Robin mentioned the typical style is "fine art oil painting", with some wiggle room allowed for exceptionally difficult cases (like Asian-themed books, as there just wasn't much fine art on that subject pre-1930). We also require that the art have some kind of connection to the book itself, so it's not just some random fine art. Sometimes the connection is a little fuzzy, but we do the best we can given that art must be pre-1930 and also must have been previously published. (My personal favorite artwork selection of the books I worked on is The Communist Manifesto[1]. That painting was actually made specifically for a different book by Willa Cather[2], but I thought the peasant laborer, holding a sickle in one hand, with a faraway look in her eyes as the red sun rises behind her was just too good to pass up for Marx!) 1920ish was when it started becoming much more common for books to have illustrated dust jackets, so now that more books from that era and onwards are entering the public domain, we opt to use the first edition dust jacket if it's in the appropriate style. Fortunately for us, that era also happens to be the so-called Golden Age of Illustration so it's not hard finding beautiful art to use! [1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/karl-marx_friedrich-engels/the-communist-manifesto/samuel-moore https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/karl-marx_friedrich-engels... [2] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/willa-cather/the-song-of-the-lark https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/willa-cather/the-song-of-t...
pastage 9mo ago
Do you think the things that makes an edition special goes missing while converting to e.g. Standard Ebooks. I remember both the The Castle and Das Schloss like they had typesetting that helped me in perceiving the feel of the book. Is there anyway to preserve that feeling and still keep within the bounds of standardisation you adhere to? (I did a quick look through my copy and it does not seem to be much that makes it unique really, just the size of the book, and the chapter heading graphics..) Do you know if the project try to look at other languages at all?
- robin_reala 9mo ago
  Nothing particularly in The Castle, from my production of it. As this was not previously PD there wasn’t any Gutenberg (or other) transcription available, so I did my own from the OCR of the original scans. A large part of the feel of the work, to me at least, comes from the extreme sentence / paragraph lengths though. We do have a default typography across all our works (the “Standard” in “Standard Ebooks” refers to a standard imprint; think Penguin) but we usually retain specific famous things where possible in a reflowable format. For example, the Mouse’s Tail in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,[1] or the letter in E. A. Poe’s “Thou Art the Man”.[2] We don’t take on other languages, no. Our tooling[3] and style guides[4] are tailored specifically to English. Absolutely nothing stopping another project from forking the codebase (it’s GPL-3) and giving it a go. [1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/lewis-carroll/alices-adventures-in-wonderland/john-tenniel/text/chapter-3#:~:text=the%20tale%20was%20something%20like%20this https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/lewis-carroll/alices-adven... [2] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/edgar-allan-poe/short-fiction/text/thou-art-the-man#:~:text=the%20following%20letter https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/edgar-allan-poe/short-fict... [3] https://github.com/standardebooks/tools https://github.com/standardebooks/tools [4] https://standardebooks.org/manual/ https://standardebooks.org/manual/
- hopelite 9mo ago
  It seems you may be making assumptions that the formatting and typesetting of any particular edition were intentional or even deliberate on the part of the author, not any number of people, from editors to printers, who could and would have influenced those things for various reasons. Something I am rather familiar with is brought out by your mention of the German edition/title; that the continental market seems to generally produce books that are far more densely formatted, i.e., smaller font and typesetting, thinner pages, and leading to overall tighter book formats. I actually appreciate it when, e.g., a book is 1/2 the size and weight, and usually also made far more durably; but it will invariably compromise any author intention related to the arrangement of the lettering. Maybe you can confirm that based on what seems to be your English and German editions of the same novel.
me_jumper 9mo ago
I could not find out if there are outstanding todos that I could assign myself to as a newcomer. I'd like to contribute, but don't know where to start. Is there an issue board somewhere with missing books, or something else?
- robin_reala 9mo ago
  Yep! Have a look at our contribution page that lists a bunch of different options, including a list of good first books. https://standardebooks.org/contribute https://standardebooks.org/contribute
- acabal 9mo ago
  We have a list of wanted ebooks here: https://standardebooks.org/contribute/wanted-ebooks https://standardebooks.org/contribute/wanted-ebooks First-time contributors should select something from the appropriate section, because that gives you the greatest chance of succeeding and the least burden on our reviewers as you get started. Our toolset has a help wanted section and some outstanding issues: https://github.com/standardebooks/tools#help-wanted https://github.com/standardebooks/tools#help-wanted
Kerrick 9mo ago
How did you get these ready for release on Public Domain Day without breaking copyright law during the production process? I am not a lawyer, so I have only a surface understanding.
- robin_reala 9mo ago
  I’m not based in the US and have no intention of travelling there, so I don’t count myself in much danger for US copyright law. Regardless, my understanding of copyright is that people broadly get annoyed when you infringe by distribution. In this case the distribution didn’t happen until the copyright had expired. People preparing these projects for later launch do it purely on their own machines, and nothing arrives at Standard Ebooks until the day of release.
  - sgc 9mo ago
    It would be close to impossible to demonstrate loss, which is always highly relevant in copyright suits (not a lawyer, but I have scanned and digitized hundreds of thousands of pages at https://CatholicLibrary.org https://CatholicLibrary.org and read up on the topic over the years).
jez 9mo ago
What’s the approach to embedding fonts in standard ebooks’ epubs? Curious whether there’s a set of fonts that producers are allowed to embed in finished books, or whether there’s project consciously avoids embedding fonts, and if so why. I tried to find a policy page on this via a standardebooks.org site search but nothing looked relevant. I’m asking after realizing that some of my favorite books were books where the ebook had intentional font choices, for example different fonts for chapter titles vs body text, fonts that matched the vibe of the book (historical, more modern, etc.) It would be nice if more ebook readers made it easy to import more than the ~8 fonts they include by default but the next best thing is when the book itself includes a great font.
- acabal 9mo ago
  The ebooks we produce are entirely in the US public domain, including metadata and any other files. Unfortunately there are basically no good fonts released under the CC0 license. (Most open fonts are released under the OFL license, which is not the same.) Therefore we don't embed any font files, except for Standard Blackletter[1] when necessary, which is a font we developed especially for our use based on public domain specimens, and released via the CC0 license. [1] https://github.com/standardebooks/standard-blackletter https://github.com/standardebooks/standard-blackletter
NoMoreNicksLeft 9mo ago
>and I’m happy to answer any questions about Standard Ebooks. When will they start assigning catalog numbers to each of their works in the way that Project Guteneberg does? I'd like a unique id per ebook and since you don't (for obvious reasons) use ISBNs, there's nothing really to be done. I can't use an OCLC id because Standard Ebooks aren't consistently listed in Worldcat, I can't use Bookbrainz or Open Library ids for the same reason. It costs nothing and is a low-effort fix. It's been an industry (and library science) thing for decades or longer. Can Standard Ebooks finally stop the amateur hour crap?
- acabal 9mo ago
  I know you griped about this in a different thread, but we won't be doing that, sorry. You can uniquely identify an ebook and its version by using dc:identifier in combination with dcterms:modified in the metadata file. If you desperately need a filesystem-safe string then concatenate those two and sha it.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 9mo ago
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pastor_williams 9mo ago
Why don't the ebooks include any of the original illustrations? This makes the children's books in particular very unattractive.
- robin_reala 9mo ago
  We do include illustrations, but in fairly defined categories: when they’re factually illustrative, when they’re graphs or charts, when they’re part of the plot (an illustration of a clue in a murder mystery, for example), or when they’re referenced from the text. The last point is why the Beatrix Potter compilation I did ended up with illustrations: the text specifically references the illustrations in a couple of the books (“Can you see…?”) so they remained. It did mean writing 602 pieces of alt text though[1] so it was a fairly major undertaking to include them. [1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/beatrix-potter/short-fiction/text/loi https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/beatrix-potter/short-ficti...
asveikau 9mo ago
What kind of features does "advanced epub" provide that "compatible epub" cannot?
- robin_reala 9mo ago
  Our projects are built with the broad assumption that the latest tech is supported across the board: the “advanced epub” is generated by zipping that up and renaming it to .epub. The build step then runs the book through a compatibility pass to remove some of the functionality that simply isn’t there in many readers. For example, it: 1. renders the cover as a JPG from the native SVG 2. converts more complicated selectors (e.g. :nth-of-type, :empty, etc.) to classes and class selectors 3. renders MathML as images 4. renders SVGs as images …and a bunch more things to make it work better with older ereaders, which tend hang around for a long time. It’s worth pointing out that the Kobo builds are closer to the “advanced” build as they have great native support for MathML and SVG. But the build step adds in a bunch of Kobo-specific markup to make it work better there. In my experience, Apple Books does the best with the advanced builds, but it doesn’t support SVG covers so you end up with autogenerated ones, which seems a shame. I’ve sent a couple of feedback issues to them over the years, but if anyone else wants to also do this feel free.
htunnicliff 9mo ago
Have any public library systems ever tried to partner with Standard Ebooks to help improve the discoverability and accessibility of classics for ebook users? It would be neat to see those editions show up in when browsing collections in apps like Libby or Overdrive (at least in the U.S.).
- acabal 9mo ago
  No, none have reached out yet. I've had some brief, high-level discussion along those lines with some people in the library industry, and the conclusion I drew is that public libraries in the US are highly fragmented in terms of technological capability. Instead of partnering with individual local library systems, it would make the most sense to - as you mentioned - partner with Overdrive. But there's been no movement in that direction. If anyone from Overdrive is reading, get in touch :)

kopirgan 9mo ago

Does the movie Maltese Falcon too enter public domain?

robin_reala 9mo ago
There are two (1931 and 1941), but no: a movie is its own work. It’s the same with translations.
- kopirgan 9mo ago
  Thanks. Was referring to the Bogart version.
  - robin_reala 9mo ago
    It’ll arrive in the US public domain in 2037, so a little wait.

nairboon 9mo ago

That's a great project! I have a hypothesis that we're getting closer to a cultural inflection point (maybe half a decade out). With every year, more important and very high-quality cultural artifacts enter the public domain, while at the same time, many low quality artefacts are produced (... AI slop). It'll be increasingly difficult to choose a good cultural artefict for consumption (e.g., which book to read next or which movie to watch). A very good indicator for quality is time and thus a useful filter. In some years we could have the following: a netflix-like (legal variant of popcorntime) software system (p2p) that serves high-quality public domain movies, for those who like it, even with AI upscaling or post processing. The same would also work for books, with this pipeline: Project Gutenberg -> Standard Ebooks. At the inflection point, there would be a steady stream of high-quality formats of high-quality content, enough to satisfy the demand of cultural consumption. You wouldn't need the latest book/movie anymore, except for interest in contemporary stuff.

carlosjobim 9mo ago
You don't have to wait. You can borrow, purchase, or pirate any books you want.

1313ed01 9mo ago

It would be interesting to see a combined list taking into account both US "1930 or older" rule and more common internationally "life+70" rule, to see what works have finally escaped both of those and make works a bit less unsafe to make use of, but I have not seen any list like that?

hopelite 9mo ago
That sounds like a good project for you then
- hopelite 9mo ago
  Apparently it’s not a good project for you
wongarsu 9mo ago
If you have a list of life+70 works, filtering that for works released before 1931 is pretty straight forward The more difficult part of any such list is the editorial decision which works to include. Even if we only cared about books published in English that would be thousands of books each year

hindustanuday 9mo ago

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idoubtit 9mo ago

The title makes it look like Public Domain is universal, while the article does mention that this list is only about the USA. > On January 1, 2026, books published in 1930 enter the U.S. public domain. The Copyright laws are different in each country, and it's a non-sense in the modern world. A few years ago, I was searching for books written by Alexandra David-Neel. I found them on a Canadian (IIRC) website, but downloads were filtered by geo-IP, since what was in the public domain there was not yet public in France. One of the books I wanted was written before 1900, and not in print since then. Yet the author died in 1969, aged 100, so the French Public Domain for her works will start in 2040. Another example: "As I lay dying" by William Faulkner is now Public Domain in the USA. It was Public Domain in Canada from 2013 to 2023. Then the law changed, and the copyright was extended by 20 years, and reinstated for this book until 2032 — which is 70 years after the author's death in 1962.

zozbot234 9mo ago
AIUI the Canadian law change did not reinstate copyright status for works that had lapsed into the public domain, though it did extend duration of existing copyright.
deleted 9mo ago
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apwheele 9mo ago

Off topic, but one thing I wish I could do is donate a single copy epub I have the rights to to all libraries. It should be technically possible (many of the places I have lived the local library uses Overdrive).

Thorrez 9mo ago
Ownership of digital files is a murky domain. When you say you have the rights to it, you might only have the right to read it, not to give it to anyone else. What was the license text when you bought it?
- apwheele 9mo ago
  Oh to be clear, these are books I own the copyright to (published through my own imprint).
  - stockresearcher 9mo ago
    This is a group that gets independent author ebooks into public libraries. Perhaps contact them to find out how to do it: https://indieauthorproject.com/authors/ https://indieauthorproject.com/authors/
    - dhosek 9mo ago
      It seems like Hoopla does a lot of self-published and indie published books. That kind of fits in with their business model where they charge a flat fee per lending of the book, so they have an incentive to get as many books on the platform as possible.

con 9mo ago

I built a small app that includes Standard Ebooks and Gutenberg ebooks for personal library management (and send to Kindle): https://scriptwerk.com https://scriptwerk.com Hopefully this makes discovery of books easier and lets people manage their libraries online - I like Calibre, but it is not great for people who are just getting started.

raudette 9mo ago

Related: for fun over the holidays, I created an ePub of a paperback copy of "I Brought The Ages Home", by Charles T. Currelly, which went out of copyright in Canada in 2007 (copyright in Canada changed from 50 to 70 years after the death of the author in 2022, but this did not affect works that were already in the public domain). I couldn't find a ebook online, so I found an old paperback copy and created one: https://www.hotelexistence.ca/create-epub-from-paperback/ https://www.hotelexistence.ca/create-epub-from-paperback/ Charles T. Currelly was like a real-life Indiana Jones, he was the first director of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and sourced much of its early collections. Even with modern OCR (I used Mistral's here), and a book with limited formatting, it's funny how hours of touch-ups are required just to get a glitch-free reading experience (no stray headers, paragraphs, page numbers sprinkled through the text).

igravious 9mo ago
This is the often unappreciated selfless that benefits all. Thank you

ChrisArchitect 9mo ago

Related: Happy Public Domain Day 2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46460440 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46460440 What will enter the public domain in 2026? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46117112 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46117112

thangalin 9mo ago

Standard Ebooks produces exceptional quality documents. Here's my comparison against similar projects: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/04/11/project-gutenberg-projects/ https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/04/11/project-gutenberg-p...

dajare 9mo ago
Somehow I stumbled across your post/series back in 2020, and that was my first introduction to Standard Ebooks. Now, these years later, I've produced >60 SE titles, and read many, many more. Needless to say, I'm greatly in your debt! :)

pncnmnp 9mo ago

Happy Public Domain Day, everyone! Such a great project. A bit tangential here, but I am really looking forward to 2035 for the public domain. A ton of culturally significant works seem to enter then - And Then There Were None, Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Batman (Detective Comics #27), Superman #1, Marvel Comics #1, and Tintin’s King Ottokar’s Sceptre. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2035_in_public_domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2035_in_public_domain Wikipedia also tells me that all of the 'life + 70" countries will have Ian Fleming's James Bond works in the public domain in 2035 as well.

erlkoenig 9mo ago

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