by Jason Snell
Downloading the new public-domain books
You may not have realized it, but for the first time in decades works began entering the public domain annually on January 1. Over at Motherboard, Caroline Haskins sorts through where you can find them:
Basically, 2019 marks the first time a huge quantity of books published in 1923—including works by Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie, and Robert Frost—have become legally downloadable since digital books became a thing. It’s a big deal—the Internet Archive had a party in San Francisco to celebrate. Next year, works from 1924 will enter the public domain, and so-on.
So, how do you actually download these books?
The short version: Online catalogs have many of the books available now, and more will be arriving in short order. The newly free works include ones by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Agatha Christie, Winston Churchill, Robert Frost, Kahlil Gibran, Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, Carl Sandburg, Edith Wharton, P.G. Wodehouse, Virginia Woolf, and E.E. Cummings.