The clearance record for e-book content this project may bundle and publicly redistribute: the cleared titles, the license basis they rest on, and the caveats to check before publishing. The cleared .epub files are in apps/board/stand_alone/ereader/content/library/ – redistributing them is exactly what the CC0 basis below permits. A title that is not in the catalog below is not cleared, and is kept off-repo.
The reader renders EPUB (see EPUB_CONFORMANCE.md). Any title shipped on-device or published as a bundle must be redistributable, which means either public domain or a license that explicitly permits redistribution.
Sourcing policy
- Primary source: Standard Ebooks. Hand-typeset editions of public-domain works, each dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0 Universal. CC0 imposes no attribution or redistribution obligations, which makes these the cleanest sources to bundle and republish. Download URL pattern (compatible EPUB): https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/<author>/<title>/downloads/<author>_<title>.epub?source=download
- Public-domain basis of the underlying text: US copyright. Works published more than 95 years ago are public domain in the US, and the line advances by one year each January. Standard Ebooks tracks US public domain.
- Policy: Standard-Ebooks-only. If Standard Ebooks does not carry a clean edition of a title, the title is not bundled rather than substituted with a lower-quality edition. Project Gutenberg is a valid public-domain fallback (strip the Project Gutenberg trademark/boilerplate before redistribution), but is not used for the shipped set.
Caveats to check before publishing
- Translations are separately copyrighted. For works not originally in English the SE edition wraps a specific public-domain translation (for example Constance Garnett for the Russian novels, Isabel F. Hapgood for Les Miserables, John Ormsby for Don Quixote). These translations are US public domain; if publishing into life-plus-70 jurisdictions, verify the translator died at least 70 years ago.
- Early-20th-century titles (for example Ulysses, The Great Gatsby, The Mysterious Affair at Styles) are public domain in the US but cleared life-plus-70 only recently. Spot-check for non-US distribution.
Cleared catalog (Standard Ebooks, CC0 1.0)
Fiction – classics
- Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
- Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
- Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
- The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
- Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
- A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
- Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
- Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
- Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
- The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Ulysses – James Joyce
- Dubliners – James Joyce
Sci-fi and adventure
- The War of the Worlds – H. G. Wells
- The Time Machine – H. G. Wells
- Journey to the Center of the Earth – Jules Verne
- A Princess of Mars – Edgar Rice Burroughs
- Tarzan of the Apes – Edgar Rice Burroughs
- The Call of the Wild – Jack London
- White Fang – Jack London
- Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
- King Solomon's Mines – H. Rider Haggard
- Gulliver's Travels – Jonathan Swift
Horror and gothic
- Dracula – Bram Stoker
- The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
- The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
- The Castle of Otranto – Horace Walpole
Mystery and detective
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Arthur Conan Doyle
- The Hound of the Baskervilles – Arthur Conan Doyle
- The Moonstone – Wilkie Collins
- The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
- The Innocence of Father Brown – G. K. Chesterton
- The Mysterious Affair at Styles – Agatha Christie
Fantasy, fairy tales and children's
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – L. Frank Baum
- The Jungle Book – Rudyard Kipling
- The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
- The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
- Anne of Green Gables – L. M. Montgomery
Poetry
- Leaves of Grass – Walt Whitman
- Paradise Lost – John Milton
Drama and plays
- Hamlet – William Shakespeare
- Macbeth – William Shakespeare
- The Importance of Being Earnest – Oscar Wilde
- Pygmalion – George Bernard Shaw
- A Doll's House – Henrik Ibsen
World literature (public-domain translations)
- Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
- The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
- Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
- The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
- The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
- Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
- Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes
Non-fiction and philosophy
- Meditations – Marcus Aurelius
- The Art of War – Sun Tzu
- On the Origin of Species – Charles Darwin
- The Prince – Niccolo Machiavelli
- Tao Te Ching – Laozi
History, memoir and travel
- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass – Frederick Douglass
- The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – Edward Gibbon
- The Histories – Herodotus
- Walden – Henry David Thoreau
- The Voyage of the Beagle – Charles Darwin