The Journal

What are public domain books and why are they free?

May 24, 20263 min readbook-clubs

A public domain book is a book whose copyright has expired, been forfeited, or never existed -- meaning no one holds the exclusive right to reproduce, distribute, or adapt it. Anyone can publish it, sell it, or give it away. Foxing gives it away.

How does a book enter the public domain?#

In the United States, copyright law is the relevant framework for most of the books in Foxing's catalog. The current rule is that works published before 1928 are in the public domain. Works published after 1927 have copyright terms that extend for decades after the author's death and may not be freely reproducible for many years.

This is why the Foxing catalog is rich in 19th-century and early 20th-century literature -- Dickens, Tolstoy, Austen, Dostoevsky, Wilde, Wells, Hemingway (through A Farewell to Arms, 1929) -- and does not include most fiction published after the late 1920s. The legal line is clear even when it is artistically arbitrary.

In other countries, copyright terms differ. In the European Union, copyright typically expires 70 years after the author's death. In Canada, it expires 50 years after death. This is why some books are freely available in some countries but not others.

Who decides what is in the public domain?#

Copyrights are national by default. The U.S. Copyright Office maintains authoritative records on copyright status for works published in the United States. For works published before 1928, the status is clear. For works from the 1920s onward, the question of whether copyright was properly registered and renewed is more complex -- many works from the 1920s and 1930s fell into the public domain because their publishers failed to renew their copyright registrations under the rules of the time.

Project Gutenberg's copyright FAQ and the HathiTrust Digital Library are the most reliable public resources for checking copyright status.

Why does it matter that they're free?#

The public domain means that the cultural inheritance of several centuries of literature -- the books that shaped how English, French, Russian, and dozens of other literary traditions understand themselves -- is available to anyone with an internet connection at no cost.

This is not a small thing. For most of recorded history, access to books was a function of wealth, geography, and social position. A person in a remote area without access to a library or the money to buy books had no access to the texts that educated, cultured people read. The public domain, combined with the internet, changed that. Every novel in the Foxing catalog that is over 97 years old is available to anyone, anywhere, for free.

Do free books mean low quality?#

No. The books in the public domain are free because they are old, not because they are bad. Anna Karenina, Frankenstein, Pride and Prejudice, and The Brothers Karamazov are in the public domain because their authors died more than 70 years ago. They are among the most seriously praised novels ever written. The best literature in human history is free to read.

What is the difference between public domain and open access?#

Public domain means copyright has expired. Open access is a separate concept -- academic and scientific research made freely available online, typically through publisher agreements or institutional repositories. Open access material may still be under copyright. Public domain material is not.

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