Standard Ebooks Public Domain Day 2025 in Literature | Hacker News Reader

Standard Ebooks Public Domain Day 2025 in Literature

standardebooks.org

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I 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.

Let me recommend from this list: The seven dials mystery

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/agatha-christie/the-seven-...

Editor in chief here, happy to answer any questions!

No 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!

Are there resources like Project Gutenberg or Standard Ebooks for other languages and countries? Especially non-Eurocentric ones?

For Gutenberg, there are a few. 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.

For 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.

For Japan/Japanese there is Aozora. They have out of copyright and public domain books.

Any newly public Japanese texts?

There 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.

Thanks

Such 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!

Standard ebooks is pure class.

People 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.

Non-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.

It's impossibile to publish free stuff on the Kindle store AFAIK, at least with KDP. Only one week free offer from time to time. This does not help.

Uh, I'm not using the Amazon ecosystem so I didn't know that this store was so inconvenient. Thanks for letting me know.

These books have been in the public domain for decades in all countries east of Germany

Not 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.

How 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?

Yes, 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.

There 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

That's kind of the entire point of being a sovereign nation?

What is? Getting to decide how you can distribute copyrighted works by other individuals in other sovereign nations?

I'm a sovereign individual, can I unilaterally decide that Disney's copyrights only last 1 year if I'm the one making the copies from my house?

They enter the public domain when the US says they do, but only for people who are held to American laws and justice system.

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