Free eBooks from great authors of the past
Tens of thousands of books written by great authors is available for free on the internet today. And it is all totally legal. Here are some examples of authors you can easily locate. Most of their written work are free to download to your computer and read:
- Mark Twain
- Harriet Beecher Stowe
- James Joyce
- Edgar Allan Poe
- Charles Dickens
- Jules Verne
- William Shakespare
- Paul Lacroix
- H. G. Wells
- Oscar Wilde
- Lewis Carroll
- Alexandre Dumas
- Rudyard Kipling
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
And the list goes on and on. You get the idea.
So why is it legal to download, read and even share the work of theese thousands of authors with others? It is simple: The books have passed over to the public domain. Basically what this means is that there are no copyrights for the material.
So when can you be sure that a book is in the public domain?
When the following conditions are fullfilled you can be pretty sure of it:
- The work was created and first published before January 1, 1923, or at least 95 years before January 1 of the current year, whichever is later
- The last surviving author died at least 70 years before January 1 of the current year
- No Berne Convention signatory has passed a perpetual copyright on the work;
- Neither the United States nor the European Union has passed a copyright term extension since these conditions were last updated. (This must be a condition because the exact numbers in the other conditions depend on the state of the law at any given moment.)
There are some exeptions though. The conditions mentioned above does not apply if you live in one of the following contries:
Colombia, Cote d'ivoire, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Samoa, and Saint Vincent or the Grenadines.
There are many ways to make use of public domain material. The most obvious one would be to read up on the classics. But it is also possible to make a living out of it. Take my self as an example. I use much of my spare time to locate litterature about self development. I have created a website with an opt-in list and send out a new book every week to my subscribers. This is a service I offer for free. In return I get a lot of traffic to my website. There are so much litterature on this topic in the public domain, and i expect to be able to send out books for years to come.
- Mark Twain
- Harriet Beecher Stowe
- James Joyce
- Edgar Allan Poe
- Charles Dickens
- Jules Verne
- William Shakespare
- Paul Lacroix
- H. G. Wells
- Oscar Wilde
- Lewis Carroll
- Alexandre Dumas
- Rudyard Kipling
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
And the list goes on and on. You get the idea.
So why is it legal to download, read and even share the work of theese thousands of authors with others? It is simple: The books have passed over to the public domain. Basically what this means is that there are no copyrights for the material.
So when can you be sure that a book is in the public domain?
When the following conditions are fullfilled you can be pretty sure of it:
- The work was created and first published before January 1, 1923, or at least 95 years before January 1 of the current year, whichever is later
- The last surviving author died at least 70 years before January 1 of the current year
- No Berne Convention signatory has passed a perpetual copyright on the work;
- Neither the United States nor the European Union has passed a copyright term extension since these conditions were last updated. (This must be a condition because the exact numbers in the other conditions depend on the state of the law at any given moment.)
There are some exeptions though. The conditions mentioned above does not apply if you live in one of the following contries:
Colombia, Cote d'ivoire, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Samoa, and Saint Vincent or the Grenadines.
There are many ways to make use of public domain material. The most obvious one would be to read up on the classics. But it is also possible to make a living out of it. Take my self as an example. I use much of my spare time to locate litterature about self development. I have created a website with an opt-in list and send out a new book every week to my subscribers. This is a service I offer for free. In return I get a lot of traffic to my website. There are so much litterature on this topic in the public domain, and i expect to be able to send out books for years to come.
