blog: published on Monday, January 11
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. If not, maybe you should’ve been. Because as luck would have it, at that very moment, a new stack of public domain books suddenly became available to read. Essentially, this means that previously copyrighted classic works of literature can now be yours for free! But let’s dig a little deeper.
what are public domain books?
When a book has “entered the public domain”, its copyright has expired and the material now belongs to the general public. Not only does this mean that anyone can creatively reinvent that original work without paying a penny, producing as much beauty as pride, prejudice, and zombies, but this book is now free for anyone to read.
You are reading: What is public domain books
Of course, if you want to read the books that topped the 2020 bestseller lists for free, you’ll have to wait a long time (95 years, today). but thousands of books, including many that we consider to be the greatest books of all time, have already entered the public domain. So if you’re looking for super affordable book club books, the public domain is a great place to start!
how to find public domain books
You might think that getting free books won’t be easy, but think again! there are plenty of online projects working to transcribe public domain books and make them available on a wide range of reading devices.
See Also: Top 5 Jewellery Making Books for Beginners – The Bench
the gutenberg project is perhaps the best known destination for public domain books and certainly one of the oldest. But both Hathi Trust and Internet Archive also have huge digital repositories, containing millions of titles, and Standard eBooks are a great source of beautifully formatted and composed eBooks.
when do the books enter the public domain?
In a nutshell:
Prior to 1964, books had a copyright term of 28 years, unless the author renewed them for an additional 28 years. this required filling out forms and managing, and apparently most authors just couldn’t be bothered, because 75% didn’t renew. so the copyrights on his books expired and those books became public domain (wow!).
however, any author who published a work after 1923 and managed to get it renewed has to get on the net and keep the copyright. due to a series of new laws, the copyright term was finally extended to 95 years, which meant that no new work entered the public domain between 1998 and 2018 (a two-decade long drought for readers) .
See Also: 75 Best Indian Authors and their Books in English (2020 Update)
As a result, January 1, 2019 was a momentous day: a stack of new books entered the public domain for the first time in over twenty years. and since then, there have been new books in the public domain on the first day of every year. in 2019 copyright expired for books published in 1923. in 2020 copyright expired for works published in 1924. and so on, bringing us now to 2021.
new public domain books to read in 2021
In a nutshell, this is all that, as of January 1, 2021, all works published or first published before January 1, 1926 became yours to own, read, and adapt. and what a year it was for literature. the full list is, shall we say, a bit difficult to navigate, so to make your life easier, we’ve rounded up twelve of the best bets from him, and they’re all gems.
***
if you prefer to read the latest hits, check out the 21 best novels written in the 21st century!
See Also: The Best Juicing Books In 2022