Public Domain Books To Download
Anthony Small
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Audio books are a great way to enjoy and share literature. Project Gutenberg no longer adds new audio books to the collection, and suggests these audio book resources. These audio books are all freely available and in the public domain in the US. They may be easily played back on computers, tablets, mobile phones, and other devices. They may be shared non-commercially, without limitation except in countries where the printed source is still copyrighted. All of the sources listed below are digitizations of texts from Project Gutenberg.
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However there's an important caveat here. What's public domain is the underlying story, not every specific creative work based on that story. So, like, you could have a book titled Alice in Wonderland, but its cover can't be Disney's Alice in Wonderland.
Watch for different copyright terms in different countries. Just because a book's copyright has expired in your country does not mean it has expired in all countries in which you plan to distribute the game. Though the Berne Convention sets a minimum copyright term of 50 years after the death of the author, countries are free to set a longer copyright term. If you have questions unanswered by Wikisource's copyright resources, ask on Law Stack Exchange.
As others have noted, being in or out of print has nothing to do with copyright status, beyond my point above that in-print versions of public domain works likely contain copyrighted materials added later.
Careful there, out of print has nothing to do with public domain. A book can be public domain and still be in print, or it can be out of print without being public domain. Also, a book can be public domain in one country and still have 50 years copyright protection in another. And if I were to write a new translation of the Bible, maybe even add a couple illustrations, that new translation would not be public domain, unless I as the rights holder say so.
You can use anything that's public domain to make a profit. You can even print the book and sell it. You can use public domain models in your game, public domain textures, and public domain music. Careful with the music: just because Beethoven lived a long time ago does not mean a 20 year old recording of a piece written by Beethoven is public domain - it's not.
If you're specifically thinking of Alice in Wonderland, the answer to your question is an unqualified YES. The book is old enough that the copyright has expired everywhere in the world, so you can do whatever you like with it: Publish excerpts or the full-text within your game, base parts of the game or the whole thing on it, turn Alice into a crack addict living on Mars, whatever you want. That's what "public domain" means. It's out of copyright and ANYONE IN THE PUBLIC has the right to use it. In the U.S. especially it's sometimes difficult to know if something's in the public domain, but you can safely assume that anything from the 19th century (Alice in Wonderland, Sherlock Holmes, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, etc. etc.) is fair game. In fact, most works up to 1922 or so are probably fair game, but then it starts to get complicated.
Also, if you just wanted to show a book on a bookshelf, without actually showing any of the content, you can legitimately show the title of ANY book, even if it's still protected by copyright. Copyright doesn't protect the titles of books, only the content of the story. You might want to avoid book titles that are also big franchise trademarks (Harry Potter, Star Wars, Chicken Soup for the Soul) but even there you'd probably be within your rights to use them. You just don't want to become the test case.
I (not a lawyer) think the correct answer is a little more nuanced. Taking the "Alice in Wonderland" example, the original publication (old edition, paper book) is indeed yours to do whatever you want with. But if you take the xyz publisher's 99'th edition E-Book (or Audio Book, or Book Book), that derivative work can be protected by its own copyright.
So for your example of including a book in a game, if you made your own photo facsimile of an out of copyright edition, you're in the the clear; but if you take advantage of someone else's digitized "Alice" you have to consider what copyright they claim.
Wikipedia says that moral rights (sometimes called "authors rights") are rights retained by the author of a work, even if they no longer hold the copyright. They include the right of attribution (or of not being attributed, at the author's discretion), and the right to ensure the integrity of the work although I'm not sure whether that would hinder you inserting the book into your game.
I couldn't say anything about the issue in legal terms, but there's another way to look at it. You could count the amount of effort it has taken to create the work. While you examine the works you see available on the net, good measurement unit is the amount of effort spent to create the work. If you create a game, and half the content is copied from otherwise available public domain work, I would only give you credit of the part that you created yourself. How to determine this relies on the following process (known as effort calculation):
This process allows examining the quality of the work you know is available on the internet. If you include alot of public domain content to your work, then this evaluation process will give bad results for your content, and thus people who look at the quality will determine it to be bad quality. So better not rely on large amounts of work created by someone else.
EDIT: given some comments, I would like to clarify that this process would be useful for understanding how publishers are looking at a products they encounter in the legal environment. This process can detect several issues with the products, including non-original content in the product.
Note, you will need to create your own cover art! I also create mine at this stage, prior to beginning the upload process. I like to make my cover art both on canva or on an app called word swag. I make it in a square shape and I tend to make two versions, one for the kindle and one for ACX. I love creating content for social media, so I actually find this step fun. You can be creative and really make this your own. Again, this is another way that differentiates your public domain version, so you might as well make it something that stands out to you. I very much enjoyed having a chance to create the two that I worked on this month.
Well, it turns out sometimes there are some snags in the road of public domain audio books! When choosing your book, if possible, try to also look for a book that has not been done or has not been done often. I was approached in March at the APAC conference by fellow voice actor, audiobook narrator, and industry friend Steve Corona and he shared with me that he had done a public domain book recently. Steve spent a good bit of time on this project, as these manuscripts can be quite long, and he was prevented from posting it as Audible said there were already too many titles like his in existence. Steve and I got together to discuss this and you can find our chat here.
Believe it or not, after Steve and I had this chat, I had the same experience! I recorded Mother Goose. I was super excited about my version, which bizarrely is still alive and well on Kindle, and just four days after going live on Audible, I received a message through ACX that they were taking it down! I was flabbergasted because they let it go live in the first place. I spent days working on this and it felt like such a loss. I have another project in limbo write now, that Kindle does not seem to want to let me upload, and I am not sure what will come of that.
On 1 January 2024, everything published in the United States in 1928 became public domain because the copyrights expired. What does that include? This page will give you a few ideas. Every book published in the US before 1928 is also in the public domain.
You can change words, including the way I did in a memoir. You can add or remove words. You can combine texts. In short, you can do anything you want to with a public domain book and are only limited by your creativity and imagination. I know people who have combined fairy tales or short stories (by theme or author) together to create a new compilation.
In 1889, Elizabeth Cochrane was a journalist for the NY World paper owned by Joseph Pulitzer. Her byline was Nellie Bly. As a publicity stunt for the paper, Nellie Bly challenged the feat set by fictional character Phileas Fogg to go around the world in 80 days. She was in New York and traveled east to London. She boarded a ship in mid-November, when the northern hemisphere was growing colder and losing daylight each day.
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