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Standard Ebooks: Public Domain Day 2026 in Literature

standardebooks.org

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Re: Standard Ebooks: Public Domain Day 2026 in Literature

#21

Post by carlosjobim »

nairboon wrote: post #14

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 o…

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

Re: Standard Ebooks: Public Domain Day 2026 in Literature

#22

Post by woliveirajr »

hopelite wrote: post #16
pastage wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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 g…

> 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.

Re: Standard Ebooks: Public Domain Day 2026 in Literature

#23

Post by wongarsu »

1313ed01 wrote: post #15

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

Re: Standard Ebooks: Public Domain Day 2026 in Literature

#25

Post by Thorrez »

apwheele wrote: post #24

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?

Re: Standard Ebooks: Public Domain Day 2026 in Literature

#26

Post by con »

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.

Re: Standard Ebooks: Public Domain Day 2026 in Literature

#27

Post by apwheele »

Thorrez wrote: post #25
apwheele wrote: post #24

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).

Re: Standard Ebooks: Public Domain Day 2026 in Literature

#28

Post by scooke »

hopelite wrote: post #16
pastage wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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 g…

The formatting they are referring to is not that of the original text but that of the Standard Ebooks project.

Re: Standard Ebooks: Public Domain Day 2026 in Literature

#29

Post by raudette »

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).

Re: Standard Ebooks: Public Domain Day 2026 in Literature

#30

Post by stockresearcher »

apwheele wrote: post #27
Thorrez wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

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