Public domain classics, preserved for reading
Free in law, often poor in experience, especially on a phone. We mirror vetted editions, make them genuinely readable, and track how much of the corpus we host against catalogs like Project Gutenberg.
Project Gutenberg and Standard Ebooks are invaluable. They digitize and curate the heritage. What they do not solve is reading comfort on the device most people carry: small screens, variable lighting, one-handed scrolling, and typography that was never meant for a browser pane. Royalty Free Text is that missing layer, a preservation mirror with a Kindle-like shelf, saved progress, and preprocessing so blank pages and broken layout do not get in the way of the text.
Today we host 211 readable titles, about 0.34% of the English Project Gutenberg index measured via Gutendex. The Coverage Atlas keeps that honest; we do not maintain a hand-waved “must preserve” list, we count against corpora that already exist.