Let’s first establish the fact that Hardcovers and Paperbacks are the best. We are book lovers and we love to feel the book in our hands and smell it. But we are also the lovers who read a lot and can’t afford to buy them. So, here’s something for us.
January 1st was Public Domain Day. Starting at midnight tens of thousands of books entered the public domain. Wait. What? It means that people can download, share, or repurpose these works for free and without retribution under US copyright law.
Under the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, “corporate” creations can be restricted under copyright law for 120 years. But there was an amendment to the act. As per that, works published between 1923 and 1977 can enter the public domain 95 years after their creation. This means that this is the first year since 1998 that a large number of works have entered the public domain.
Basically, 2019 marks the first time a huge quantity of books published in 1923—including works by Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie, and Robert Frost—have become legally downloadable since digital books became a thing. Next year, works from 1924 will enter the public domain, and so-on.
So, how do you actually download these books?
It depends on the site you go to, and if you can’t find a book on one site, it’s bound to be on another. For instance, ReadPrint.com, and The Literature Network (mostly major authors), and Authorama (all in the public domain), and over a dozen other sites all have vast selections of free ebooks.
There’s also a handful of archiving projects that are doing extensive work to digitize books, journals, music, and other forms of media. A blog post from Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain listed some of the most recognizable works published in 1923, as well as links to download these books on digital archiving projects Internet Archive, HathiTrust, and the Gutenberg Project. The books include:
- Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan and the Golden Lion
- Agatha Christie, The Murder on the Links
- Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis
- Robert Frost, New Hampshire
- Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
- Aldous Huxley, Antic Hay
- D.H. Lawrence, Kangaroo
- Bertrand and Dora Russell, The Prospects of Industrial Civilization
- Carl Sandburg, Rootabaga Pigeons
- Edith Wharton, A Son at the Front
- P.G. Wodehouse, The Inimitable Jeeves and Leave it to Psmith
- Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room
- E.E. Cummings, Tulips and Chimneys
In total HathiTrust, a massive digital archiving project, has also uploaded more than 53,000 works published in 1923 that just entered the public domain. Over 17,650 of them are books written in English. Similarly, Internet Archive has already uploaded over 15,000 works written in English that year.
Project Gutenberg, which has over 58,000 free downloadable books, has digitized five works that entered the public domain in the new year: The Meredith Mystery by Natalie Sumner Lincoln, The Golden Boys Rescued by Radio L. P. Wyman, White Lightning Edwin by Herbert Lewis, The Garden of God by H. De Vere Stacpoole, and The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran.
I am not aware of the listed books except a few but I am sure they will be a treat.
Source: Motherboard