Culture Talk

Where to find free, legal classic books (a quick public domain explainer)

A few people asked in another thread, so here's a short explainer. Not legal advice, though I am, unfortunately, a lawyer.

What public domain means: once copyright expires, anyone can copy, share and adapt the work. The term varies by country. In much of the world it's the author's life plus 70 years, but the US has its own rules for older works.

Where to read: Project Gutenberg has tens of thousands of free ebooks. Standard Ebooks takes public domain texts and formats them beautifully. LibriVox has free audiobooks read by volunteers. The Internet Archive has scans of old editions.

A catch: a new translation or edited edition of an old book can have its own copyright, even if the original doesn't. So Homer is free, but a 2010 translation of Homer is not.

That's it. Go read Middlemarch for free.