The biggest collection of public domain e-books on the web. Many classics and primary sources.
Library of Congress Digitized Children's Book Collection
From Humpty Dumpty to Little Red Riding Hood, the books in this collection were published in the United States and England before 1924, are no longer under copyright, and are free to read and share.
This special collection presents children’s books selected from the General and Rare Book Collections at the Library of Congress. The collection includes classic works that are still read by children today, and lesser-known treasures drawn from the Library’s extensive collection of historically significant children’s books.
"HathiTrust is devoted to an array of archival and access services in support of the record of human knowledge. All objects in the archive are either in the public domain, have the necessary permissions to support the level of access afforded, or are simply archived in such a way as to ensure an enduring copy of the content."
Google Books also contains both public domain and copyright protected content. Public domain books are available in full-text to be searched and read.
The term “public domain” refers to creative materials that are not protected by intellectual property laws such as copyright, trademark, or patent laws. The public owns these works, not an individual author or artist. Anyone can use a public domain work without obtaining permission, but no one can ever own it.
An important wrinkle to understand about public domain material is that, while each work belongs to the public, collections of public domain works may be protected by copyright.
There are four common ways that works arrive in the public domain:
For more information, see Copyright & Fair Use: The Public Domain by Stanford University Libraries
You can also find a great deal of public domain information (and inspiration) at The Public Domain Review.
Infographic source: Copyright & Fair Use - GCFGlobal.org
Creative Commons works are published with a license that specifies what you can do with them. You are allowed to use them without permission and without any charge, but you must follow other specified restrictions depending on the license, which are explained here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
CC0 is the "no copyright reserved" license option in the - it effectively means relinquishing all copyright and similar rights that you hold in a work and dedicating those rights to the public domain.
Look for works labeled CC0.
LibriVox is home to a group of worldwide volunteers who read and record public domain texts creating free public domain audiobooks for download from their website and other digital library hosting sites on the internet.
LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain, and then the audio files are released back onto the net for free. All the audio is in the public domain, so you may use it for whatever purpose you wish.
Please note: Readers are free to choose the books they wish to record. LibriVox sees itself as a library of audiobooks. Because the books being read are in the public domain, readers and listeners should be aware that many of them are very old, and may contain language or express notions that are antiquated at best, offending at worst.
So – try browsing Librivox recordings for ideas of public domain texts to read!
