Standard Ebooks in the public domain

The start of this month saw a lot of copyrighted material come to the end of its protected life and enter the public domain. It will not surprise you to learn that among the newly available out-of-copyright material you can find a number of books.

To help you work out what this might mean for you Standard Ebooks have produced a list of 20 of the best books entering the public domain in 2026.

Who or what, you might well ask, are Standard Ebooks?

Interestingly, they are “a volunteer-driven effort to produce a collection of high quality, carefully formatted, accessible, open source, and free public domain ebooks that meet or exceed the quality of commercially produced ebooks. The text and cover art in our ebooks are already believed to be in the U.S. public domain, and Standard Ebooks dedicates its own work to the public domain, thus releasing the entirety of each ebook file into the public domain. All the ebooks we produce are distributed free of cost and free of U.S. copyright restrictions.”

You can find out more at the Standard Ebooks website.