Public domain short stories archive#
Public domain short stories series#

In 2020, the copyright for works published in 1924 expired. In 2019, the copyright for books published in 1923 expired. And since then, there have been new books in the public domain on the first day of every year.

Public domain short stories series#

Due to a series of new laws, that copyright term was eventually extended to 95 years - which meant that no new works became public domain between 19 (a long drought of two decades for readers).Īs a result, January 1st 2019 was a momentous day: a pile of new books entered the public domain for the first time in more than twenty years. However, any author who published work after 1923 and managed to renew it got to slip through the net and keep their copyright to themselves.

So the copyrights on their books expired and those books became public domain (woo-hoo!). This required form-filling and admin, and apparently most authors just couldn’t be bothered, because 75% didn’t renew. Prior to 1964, books had a 28-year copyright term, unless renewed by the author for a further 28 years.

Public domain short stories archive#

But both Hathi Trust and Internet Archive also have huge digital repositories, containing millions of titles, and Standard Ebooks is a great source for beautifully formatted and typeset ebooks. Project Gutenberg is perhaps the best-known destination for public domain books, and certainly one of the oldest. You might think that getting your hands on free books won’t be easy - but think again! There are loads of online projects working to transcribe public domain books and make them available on a wide range of reading devices. But thousands of books, including many that we consider to be the best books of all time, have already entered the public domain. So if you're looking for super-accessible book club books, the public domain is a great place to start! Of course, if you want to read the books that topped the 2020 bestseller lists free of charge, you’ll be waiting a very long time (95 years, as it stands). Not only does this mean that anybody can creatively reinvent that original work without paying a penny - producing such beauty as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies - but also that this book is now free for anyone to read. When a book has “entered the public domain”, its copyright has expired and the material now belongs to the general public. Essentially, this means that previously copyrighted classic works of literature can now be yours for free! But let’s dig a little deeper. Because as luck would have it, at that very moment, a new stack of public domain books suddenly became available to read. We bet our hats that when the clocks struck twelve on New Year’s Eve you were adding “read more classic books” to your list of New Year’s resolutions. The Ultimate Guide to New Public Domain Books