Public Domain Resources
Works in the Public Domain are freely available to use because they have fallen out of copyright, or were created without it. Books, audiobooks, videos, photos, articles, and more can be found—but keep in mind that most items in the Public Domain are 100+ years old.
Also important to keep in mind is that copyright laws vary from country to country. Something that might be in the Public Domain in another country won’t necessarily be in the Public Domain in the US, and vice versa.
The online resources below all house digital versions of Public Domain materials.
Project Gutenberg
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Project Gutenberg is an online library of free eBooks. Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related content today. |
LibriVox
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LibriVox aims to make all books in the public domain available, narrated by real people and distributed for free, in audio format on the internet. |
The Internet Archive
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Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more. |
Wikisource
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Wikisource is a repository of source texts in any language which are either in the public domain, or are released under the cc-by-sa 3.0 license (and for texts published before June 15th, 2009, also under the GNU Free Documentation License). The site is part of the Wikimedia foundation and is a sister project of Wikipedia. |
IMSLP
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IMSLP, also known as the International Music Score Library Project or Petrucci Music Library, was started in 2006. Their goal is to gather all public domain music scores, in addition to the music scores of all contemporary composers (or their estates) who wish to release them to the public free of charge. |
