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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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?
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.
I seem to remember that they had some very opinionated rules at the beginning regarding allowed spelling and typography. Some of them felt distinctly American to me. I don't know if that's still the case.
It’s en-US typography (flavoured by the Chicago Manual of Style). Spelling is based on the original book, though some modernisations are made. Commits with these always start with [Editorial] for easy later reference, and are typically things like to-day -> today.
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.
Well that depends, there are obviously authors that care about these things. I have no idea what Brods intentions were with the book, and if he cared about layout.
The German and Swedish editions I read were similarly typeset, and the first scan I found in English felt similar. What I wanted to know was if there was some thought into it, because the website is nicely designed so striving for a unique typesetting strategy could be a goal.
I found it amusing, considering all those memes about German words with 35 letters each.
And, as I get older, I began to consider letter size relevant to choose a book edition. Gave up buying new books and went for used, older editions with bigger letters.
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.
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]
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I built a small app that includes Standard Ebooks and Gutenberg ebooks for personal library management (and send to Kindle): 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.
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?
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
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).
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?
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.
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/
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).
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.
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.
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
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?
We have a list of wanted ebooks here: 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
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
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?
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-adven...
[2] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/edgar-allan-poe/short-fict...
[3] https://github.com/standardebooks/tools
[4] https://standardebooks.org/manual/
I seem to remember that they had some very opinionated rules at the beginning regarding allowed spelling and typography. Some of them felt distinctly American to me. I don't know if that's still the case.
Apart from that, they produce nice editions.
It’s en-US typography (flavoured by the Chicago Manual of Style). Spelling is based on the original book, though some modernisations are made. Commits with these always start with [Editorial] for easy later reference, and are typically things like to-day -> today.
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.
Well that depends, there are obviously authors that care about these things. I have no idea what Brods intentions were with the book, and if he cared about layout.
The German and Swedish editions I read were similarly typeset, and the first scan I found in English felt similar. What I wanted to know was if there was some thought into it, because the website is nicely designed so striving for a unique typesetting strategy could be a goal.
> tighter
I found it amusing, considering all those memes about German words with 35 letters each.
And, as I get older, I began to consider letter size relevant to choose a book edition. Gave up buying new books and went for used, older editions with bigger letters.
The formatting they are referring to is not that of the original text but that of the Standard Ebooks project.
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.
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
[2] https://standardebooks.org/artworks
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...
[2] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/willa-cather/the-song-of-t...
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.
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.
Do you plan to provide PDF ?
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/f...
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.
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.
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.
I built a small app that includes Standard Ebooks and Gutenberg ebooks for personal library management (and send to Kindle): 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.
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?
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
That sounds like a good project for you then
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).
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?
Oh to be clear, these are books I own the copyright to (published through my own imprint).
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/
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.
You don't have to wait. You can borrow, purchase, or pirate any books you want.
Related:
Happy Public Domain Day 2026
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46460440
What will enter the public domain in 2026?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46117112
Does the movie Maltese Falcon too enter public domain?
There are two (1931 and 1941), but no: a movie is its own work. It’s the same with translations.
Thanks.
Was referring to the Bogart version.
It’ll arrive in the US public domain in 2037, so a little wait.