Are you an avid reader? Do you have a school project that requires you to read a classic or older book? Do you enjoy reading books from online downloads or getting downloadable audio books? If you’ve answered yes to any of these questions, then you may enjoy free public domain books.
You can download many great books from your computer for free and read them without paying a dime. How is this possible? Well, about 15% of the books in the world are part of the public domain. This means they are accessible to the public to use however they want and you don’t have to pay for them.
What kind of books are we talking about here? Well, as mentioned, there are many books in the public domain and that doesn’t mean all of them are going to be something you want to read. In fact, a good majority of them are probably books you have never heard of before. But there are also some great classics that are public domain.
Some examples of time-worthy books you may want to consider are:
1. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
2. The Art of War by 6th Cent B.C. Sunzi
3. The Notebooks of Leonardi Da Vinci
4. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
5. Paradise Lost by John Milton
6. The Iliad by Homer
7. Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzche
While you won’t find the hottest new releases on the public domain, there are many great books to read that you can download completely for free.
So where can you find these public domain books? There are actually many different sources for public domain books but one location is Project Gutenburg. There are over 25,000 free books, mostly classic literature, in the Project Gutenburg online catalogue. If you’re looking for audio books, those are found in the public domain as well.
A book is considered public domain if it no longer has a specific copyright holder. There may have been a copyright holder at one time but there isn’t any more. There are different reasons why a book’s copyright may expire. In most countries, a book is copyrighted for 20 years but in the United States, the laws are a bit different regarding this.
In the U.S., any book published after 1923 becomes public domain 95 years after the date that it was published. Books that are published after 1978 will become public domain 70 years after the author’s death.
