Standard Ebooks: Public Domain Day 2026 in Literature

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/

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.

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.

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.