FRESH

Hacker News

Standard Ebooks: Public Domain Day 2026 in Literature

378 points by WithinReason

by raudette

1 subcomments

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).

by robin_reala

10 subcomments

I’m a contributor – I did Kafka’s The Castle, Agatha Christie’s Giant’s Bread, and Stella Benson’s The Faraway Bride for this launch – and I’m happy to answer any questions about Standard Ebooks.

by idoubtit

2 subcomments

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.

by con

0 subcomment

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.

by thangalin

1 subcomments

Standard Ebooks produces exceptional quality documents. Here's my comparison against similar projects:
https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/04/11/project-gutenberg-p...

by pncnmnp

0 subcomment

Happy Public Domain Day, everyone! Such a great project.
A bit tangential here, but I am really looking forward to 2035 for the public domain. A ton of culturally significant works seem to enter then - And Then There Were None, Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Batman (Detective Comics #27), Superman #1, Marvel Comics #1, and Tintin’s King Ottokar’s Sceptre.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2035_in_public_domain
Wikipedia also tells me that all of the 'life + 70" countries will have Ian Fleming's James Bond works in the public domain in 2035 as well.

by ChrisArchitect

0 subcomment

Related:
Happy Public Domain Day 2026
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46460440
What will enter the public domain in 2026?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46117112

by 1313ed01

2 subcomments

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?

by apwheele

1 subcomments

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).

by kopirgan

1 subcomments

by nairboon

1 subcomments

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.

by hindustanuday

0 subcomment