[HN Gopher] Standard Ebooks: Public Domain Day 2026 in Literature
___________________________________________________________________
Standard Ebooks: Public Domain Day 2026 in Literature
Author : WithinReason
Score : 324 points
Date : 2026-01-02 08:40 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (standardebooks.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (standardebooks.org)
| robin_reala wrote:
| 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.
| fxbois wrote:
| Do you plan to provide PDF ?
| cess11 wrote:
| I don't know their reasons but PDF is a rather problematic
| format so I suspect that's why.
|
| You can run their EPUB through Pandoc to convert yourself, or
| put some effort in and setup your own Calibre instance which
| will do something similar when you ask it to.
| dajare wrote:
| SE makes ebooks available in four formats: "compatible" epub;
| "advanced" epub; kobo-compatible ("kepub"); and kindle
| ("azw3"). No PDFs.
|
| One of the SE editors experimented with turning SE ebooks
| into PDFs, though. See more about that here: https://groups.g
| oogle.com/g/standardebooks/c/Xy2bwiexLeM/m/f...
| as1mov wrote:
| Probably a dumb question, but how do you guys decide (and
| source) the book covers? I love how they look, but as a
| philistine can't put into words why.
|
| Also thanks for doing this, I've read a bunch of stuff (GK
| Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, Dashiell Hammett) that I wouldn't
| have otherwise if it weren't for this service.
| robin_reala wrote:
| The historical criteria is fine-art style oil painting. These
| days we're starting to use first-edition cover art a bunch
| for more modern productions if it's good quality. We also
| tend to use abstract oil paintings for sci-fi.[1] Obviously,
| all art is sourced from the public domain too. We've also
| started a database of confirmed-US-PD artwork that we can use
| for future productions.[2]
|
| [1] https://standardebooks.org/subjects/science-fiction
|
| [2] https://standardebooks.org/artworks
| acabal wrote:
| As Robin mentioned the typical style is "fine art oil
| painting", with some wiggle room allowed for exceptionally
| difficult cases (like Asian-themed books, as there just
| wasn't much fine art on that subject pre-1930).
|
| We also require that the art have some kind of connection to
| the book itself, so it's not just some random fine art.
| Sometimes the connection is a little fuzzy, but we do the
| best we can given that art must be pre-1930 and also must
| have been previously published.
|
| (My personal favorite artwork selection of the books I worked
| on is The Communist Manifesto[1]. That painting was actually
| made specifically for a different book by Willa Cather[2],
| but I thought the peasant laborer, holding a sickle in one
| hand, with a faraway look in her eyes as the red sun rises
| behind her was just _too good to pass up_ for Marx!)
|
| 1920ish was when it started becoming much more common for
| books to have illustrated dust jackets, so now that more
| books from that era and onwards are entering the public
| domain, we opt to use the first edition dust jacket if it's
| in the appropriate style. Fortunately for us, that era also
| happens to be the so-called Golden Age of Illustration so
| it's not hard finding beautiful art to use!
|
| [1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/karl-marx_friedrich-
| engels...
|
| [2] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/willa-cather/the-song-
| of-t...
| pastage wrote:
| Do you think the things that makes an edition special goes
| missing while converting to e.g. Standard Ebooks. I remember
| both the The Castle and Das Schloss like they had typesetting
| that helped me in perceiving the feel of the book. Is there
| anyway to preserve that feeling and still keep within the
| bounds of standardisation you adhere to? (I did a quick look
| through my copy and it does not seem to be much that makes it
| unique really, just the size of the book, and the chapter
| heading graphics..)
|
| Do you know if the project try to look at other languages at
| all?
| robin_reala wrote:
| Nothing particularly in _The Castle_ , from my production of
| it. As this was not previously PD there wasn't any Gutenberg
| (or other) transcription available, so I did my own from the
| OCR of the original scans. A large part of the feel of the
| work, to me at least, comes from the extreme sentence /
| paragraph lengths though.
|
| We do have a default typography across all our works (the
| "Standard" in "Standard Ebooks" refers to a standard imprint;
| think Penguin) but we usually retain specific famous things
| where possible in a reflowable format. For example, the
| Mouse's Tail in _Alice's Adventures in Wonderland_ ,[1] or
| the letter in E. A. Poe's "Thou Art the Man".[2]
|
| We don't take on other languages, no. Our tooling[3] and
| style guides[4] are tailored specifically to English.
| Absolutely nothing stopping another project from forking the
| codebase (it's GPL-3) and giving it a go.
|
| [1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/lewis-carroll/alices-
| adven...
|
| [2] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/edgar-allan-poe/short-
| fict...
|
| [3] https://github.com/standardebooks/tools
|
| [4] https://standardebooks.org/manual/
| hopelite wrote:
| It seems you may be making assumptions that the formatting
| and typesetting of any particular edition were intentional or
| even deliberate on the part of the author, not any number of
| people, from editors to printers, who could and would have
| influenced those things for various reasons.
|
| Something I am rather familiar with is brought out by your
| mention of the German edition/title; that the continental
| market seems to generally produce books that are far more
| densely formatted, i.e., smaller font and typesetting,
| thinner pages, and leading to overall tighter book formats. I
| actually appreciate it when, e.g., a book is 1/2 the size and
| weight, and usually also made far more durably; but it will
| invariably compromise any author intention related to the
| arrangement of the lettering.
|
| Maybe you can confirm that based on what seems to be your
| English and German editions of the same novel.
| pastage wrote:
| Well that depends, there are obviously authors that care
| about these things. I have no idea what Brods intentions
| were with the book, and if he cared about layout.
|
| The German and Swedish editions I read were similarly
| typeset, and the first scan I found in English felt
| similar. What I wanted to know was if there was some
| thought into it, because the website is nicely designed so
| striving for a unique typesetting strategy could be a goal.
| woliveirajr wrote:
| > tighter
|
| I found it amusing, considering all those memes about
| German words with 35 letters each.
|
| And, as I get older, I began to consider letter size
| relevant to choose a book edition. Gave up buying new books
| and went for used, older editions with bigger letters.
| scooke wrote:
| The formatting they are referring to is not that of the
| original text but that of the Standard Ebooks project.
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| I seem to remember that they had some very opinionated rules
| at the beginning regarding allowed spelling and typography.
| Some of them felt distinctly American to me. I don't know if
| that's still the case.
|
| Apart from that, they produce nice editions.
| robin_reala wrote:
| It's en-US typography (flavoured by the Chicago Manual of
| Style). Spelling is based on the original book, though some
| modernisations are made. Commits with these always start
| with [Editorial] for easy later reference, and are
| typically things like to-day -> today.
| me_jumper wrote:
| I could not find out if there are outstanding todos that I
| could assign myself to as a newcomer. I'd like to contribute,
| but don't know where to start. Is there an issue board
| somewhere with missing books, or something else?
| robin_reala wrote:
| Yep! Have a look at our contribution page that lists a bunch
| of different options, including a list of good first books.
| https://standardebooks.org/contribute
| acabal wrote:
| We have a list of wanted ebooks here:
| https://standardebooks.org/contribute/wanted-ebooks
|
| First-time contributors should select something from the
| appropriate section, because that gives you the greatest
| chance of succeeding and the least burden on our reviewers as
| you get started.
|
| Our toolset has a help wanted section and some outstanding
| issues: https://github.com/standardebooks/tools#help-wanted
| Kerrick wrote:
| How did you get these ready for release on Public Domain Day
| without breaking copyright law during the production process? I
| am not a lawyer, so I have only a surface understanding.
| robin_reala wrote:
| I'm not based in the US and have no intention of travelling
| there, so I don't count myself in much danger for US
| copyright law.
|
| Regardless, my understanding of copyright is that people
| broadly get annoyed when you infringe by distribution. In
| this case the distribution didn't happen until the copyright
| had expired. People preparing these projects for later launch
| do it purely on their own machines, and nothing arrives at
| Standard Ebooks until the day of release.
| jez wrote:
| What's the approach to embedding fonts in standard ebooks'
| epubs? Curious whether there's a set of fonts that producers
| are allowed to embed in finished books, or whether there's
| project consciously avoids embedding fonts, and if so why.
|
| I tried to find a policy page on this via a standardebooks.org
| site search but nothing looked relevant.
|
| I'm asking after realizing that some of my favorite books were
| books where the ebook had intentional font choices, for example
| different fonts for chapter titles vs body text, fonts that
| matched the vibe of the book (historical, more modern, etc.) It
| would be nice if more ebook readers made it easy to import more
| than the ~8 fonts they include by default but the next best
| thing is when the book itself includes a great font.
| acabal wrote:
| The ebooks we produce are entirely in the US public domain,
| including metadata and any other files. Unfortunately there
| are basically no good fonts released under the CC0 license.
| (Most open fonts are released under the OFL license, which is
| not the same.) Therefore we don't embed any font files,
| except for Standard Blackletter[1] when necessary, which is a
| font we developed especially for our use based on public
| domain specimens, and released via the CC0 license.
|
| [1] https://github.com/standardebooks/standard-blackletter
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >and I'm happy to answer any questions about Standard Ebooks.
|
| When will they start assigning catalog numbers to each of their
| works in the way that Project Guteneberg does? I'd like a
| unique id per ebook and since you don't (for obvious reasons)
| use ISBNs, there's nothing really to be done. I can't use an
| OCLC id because Standard Ebooks aren't consistently listed in
| Worldcat, I can't use Bookbrainz or Open Library ids for the
| same reason.
|
| It costs nothing and is a low-effort fix. It's been an industry
| (and library science) thing for decades or longer. Can Standard
| Ebooks finally stop the amateur hour crap?
| acabal wrote:
| I know you griped about this in a different thread, but we
| won't be doing that, sorry. You can uniquely identify an
| ebook and its version by using dc:identifier in combination
| with dcterms:modified in the metadata file. If you
| desperately need a filesystem-safe string then concatenate
| those two and sha it.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Sha's aren't human-readable, aren't concise. It's a shit
| way of doing it.
|
| Not that it matters, most of your catalog is done better by
| others, I'll just go with them. Why would I want books from
| people who have an aversion for doing things right?
| pastor_williams wrote:
| Why don't the ebooks include any of the original illustrations?
| This makes the children's books in particular very
| unattractive.
| robin_reala wrote:
| We do include illustrations, but in fairly defined
| categories: when they're factually illustrative, when they're
| graphs or charts, when they're part of the plot (an
| illustration of a clue in a murder mystery, for example), or
| when they're referenced from the text.
|
| The last point is why the Beatrix Potter compilation I did
| ended up with illustrations: the text specifically references
| the illustrations in a couple of the books ("Can you
| see...?") so they remained. It did mean writing 602 pieces of
| alt text though[1] so it was a fairly major undertaking to
| include them.
|
| [1] https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/beatrix-potter/short-
| ficti...
| asveikau wrote:
| What kind of features does "advanced epub" provide that
| "compatible epub" cannot?
| robin_reala wrote:
| Our projects are built with the broad assumption that the
| latest tech is supported across the board: the "advanced
| epub" is generated by zipping that up and renaming it to
| .epub. The build step then runs the book through a
| compatibility pass to remove some of the functionality that
| simply isn't there in many readers. For example, it:
|
| 1. renders the cover as a JPG from the native SVG
|
| 2. converts more complicated selectors (e.g. :nth-of-type,
| :empty, etc.) to classes and class selectors
|
| 3. renders MathML as images
|
| 4. renders SVGs as images
|
| ...and a bunch more things to make it work better with older
| ereaders, which tend hang around for a long time.
|
| It's worth pointing out that the Kobo builds are closer to
| the "advanced" build as they have great native support for
| MathML and SVG. But the build step adds in a bunch of Kobo-
| specific markup to make it work better there.
|
| In my experience, Apple Books does the best with the advanced
| builds, but it doesn't support SVG covers so you end up with
| autogenerated ones, which seems a shame. I've sent a couple
| of feedback issues to them over the years, but if anyone else
| wants to also do this feel free.
| htunnicliff wrote:
| Have any public library systems ever tried to partner with
| Standard Ebooks to help improve the discoverability and
| accessibility of classics for ebook users?
|
| It would be neat to see those editions show up in when browsing
| collections in apps like Libby or Overdrive (at least in the
| U.S.).
| acabal wrote:
| No, none have reached out yet. I've had some brief, high-
| level discussion along those lines with some people in the
| library industry, and the conclusion I drew is that public
| libraries in the US are highly fragmented in terms of
| technological capability. Instead of partnering with
| individual local library systems, it would make the most
| sense to - as you mentioned - partner with Overdrive. But
| there's been no movement in that direction. If anyone from
| Overdrive is reading, get in touch :)
| kopirgan wrote:
| Does the movie Maltese Falcon too enter public domain?
| robin_reala wrote:
| There are two (1931 and 1941), but no: a movie is its own work.
| It's the same with translations.
| kopirgan wrote:
| Thanks.
|
| Was referring to the Bogart version.
| robin_reala wrote:
| It'll arrive in the US public domain in 2037, so a little
| wait.
| nairboon wrote:
| 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.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| You don't have to wait. You can borrow, purchase, or pirate any
| books you want.
| 1313ed01 wrote:
| 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?
| hopelite wrote:
| That sounds like a good project for you then
| wongarsu wrote:
| If you have a list of life+70 works, filtering that for works
| released before 1931 is pretty straight forward
|
| The more difficult part of any such list is the editorial
| decision which works to include. Even if we only cared about
| books published in English that would be thousands of books
| each year
| idoubtit wrote:
| 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| AIUI the Canadian law change did not reinstate copyright status
| for works that had lapsed into the public domain, though it did
| extend duration of existing copyright.
| apwheele wrote:
| 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).
| Thorrez wrote:
| Ownership of digital files is a murky domain.
|
| When you say you have the rights to it, you might only have the
| right to read it, not to give it to anyone else. What was the
| license text when you bought it?
| apwheele wrote:
| Oh to be clear, these are books I own the copyright to
| (published through my own imprint).
| stockresearcher wrote:
| This is a group that gets independent author ebooks into
| public libraries. Perhaps contact them to find out how to
| do it:
|
| https://indieauthorproject.com/authors/
| dhosek wrote:
| It seems like Hoopla does a lot of self-published and
| indie published books. That kind of fits in with their
| business model where they charge a flat fee per lending
| of the book, so they have an incentive to get as many
| books on the platform as possible.
| con wrote:
| 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.
| raudette wrote:
| 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).
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| 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
| thangalin wrote:
| Standard Ebooks produces exceptional quality documents. Here's my
| comparison against similar projects:
|
| https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/04/11/project-gutenberg-p...
| pncnmnp wrote:
| 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.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-01-02 23:00 UTC)