Copyright & public domain

We host literary works that are in the public domain in the United Kingdom(generally, authors who died before 1955). Each book includes source attribution, primarily Standard Ebooks andProject Gutenberg.

Copyright laws differ by country. If you are outside the UK, check your local laws before reading. We make no representation that works are free of restrictions in your jurisdiction.

Royalty Free Text does not claim copyright over public-domain texts. Our presentation layer preserves and presents these works for reading. Standard Ebooks dedicates their edition work to the public domain (CC0).

How we select sources

Tier 1: Standard Ebooks EPUBs (CC0). Tier 2: Gutendex for metadata only. Tier 3: Project Gutenberg EPUB with license preserved. We do not scrape unknown aggregators or host modern translations without clearance.

Every hosted title has a provenance record in our manifest: source URL, license URI, author death year, UK PD verification date, and file hash.

How we count

The Coverage Atlas compares titles readable here against external reference corpora, chiefly Project Gutenberg, via the Gutendex API. Those denominators refresh at build time. We do not maintain an editorial “must preserve” canon for the atlas; we report honest ratios against catalogs that already exist.

Collection pages on this site use separate themed shelves for browsing. Those lists help you find books; they are not the atlas denominator.