What Is Project Gutenberg? Finding Free Books and Checking Copyright

Project Gutenberg is the oldest digital library of free ebooks. Michael Hart started it in 1971. Its About page describes it as “an online library of more than 75,000 free eBooks” (checked in October 2026), digitised and proofread over the years by thousands of volunteers.

For anyone learning English by reading a lot, it is the obvious place to find classics in the original, at no cost. The first visit can still be confusing. Which edition, which file, and are you actually allowed to read it where you live? This post covers what the library is, how to find a book, and the copyright point that is easy to miss.

What is in it

Project Gutenberg is based in the United States and selects books under US copyright law. Its license page says: “Nearly all the individual works in the collection are in the public domain in the United States.” In the US, as of 2026, works published in 1930 or earlier are out of copyright. Some later works are also in the public domain, for example because a renewal that was required at the time was never filed.

So the shelves hold mostly books from the 19th and early 20th centuries: classics like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Pride and Prejudice, fairy tales and fables, poetry, history. Most are in English, but there are books in French, German and other languages too. A few works are still under US copyright and are included with the copyright holder’s permission. In those cases the terms are inside the book.

How to find a book

Type a title or an author’s name into the search box at gutenberg.org. A short word like “Alice” works. There is also a list of the most downloaded books, which is a reasonable place to start if you have no title in mind.

Each book page lists the download formats. The page for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, for example, offers:

• EPUB3, marked as recommended for most devices
• EPUB for older e-readers, with or without images
• Kindle formats, one for current devices and one for older ones
• Plain Text
• HTML, to read in a browser or download as a zip

If you are not sure, I would pick EPUB3 for Apple Books on an iPhone or iPad and the Kindle format for a Kindle. If you just want to look inside, open the HTML version in your browser. Nothing needs to be installed.

A few things trip people up. The same title can appear in more than one edition, with or without illustrations, or based on different source texts. Every book begins and ends with Project Gutenberg’s standard notice and license, so the first screens may be legal text, not the story. And these are old books, so some spelling and phrasing will feel dated. None of them were written for learners, so I think the safest first choices are short children’s books or stories whose plot you already know. I collected the ones I consider good for learners in 30 Free Classic Books for English Learners.

What “public domain in the USA” means

This is the part that matters most. A book page says “Public domain in the USA.” It does not say the book is in the public domain everywhere.

The license page is direct about this. If you are outside the United States, you have to “check the laws of the country you live in before downloading and distributing our ebooks,” and the Foundation “makes no representations concerning the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United States.”

The reason is that copyright terms are counted differently. The US rule for older books depends on when the work was published. In many other countries the term runs for a fixed number of years after the author’s death. In the UK and the EU, the term is the author’s life plus 70 years. Japan moved from life plus 50 to life plus 70 on 30 December 2018, without reviving works that had already expired (Agency for Cultural Affairs Q&A, in Japanese). Japan also adds wartime extensions to works by nationals of the Allied countries, 3,794 days in the case of the United States.

A concrete example makes the difference clear. Agatha Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published in 1920. It is in the public domain in the US, so it is on Project Gutenberg. But Christie died in 1976, so in the UK her work is protected until the end of 2046, and in Japan it is also still protected. A book that is free in the US is not automatically free where you are.

In practice, I think the simplest habit is to look at the author’s dates. Project Gutenberg shows the birth and death years next to each author’s name. Under a life plus 70 rule, an author who died more than 70 years ago is out of copyright, though Japan’s wartime extensions can add about ten years for some authors. For an author who died more recently than that, I would check your own country’s rules before downloading, and be careful about sharing the files.

If you plan to redistribute the files, for example as class material or for sale, there are also conditions about the Project Gutenberg trademark. For reading on your own you don’t need to worry about that part, but the license page is worth one read if you teach.

Reading Project Gutenberg inside an app

I make ABC George, a free reading app for iPhone and iPad that holds the catalogue of Project Gutenberg’s English books, more than 61,000 of them. Searching by title or author works without a connection. When you pick a book, the app downloads the text and cover directly from gutenberg.org, with no third-party service in between.

On download it removes the standard notice at the start and end, finds the chapters and splits very long ones into readable lengths. While you read, you can long-press a word and tap Look up to see a plain-English definition and the WordNet senses, and the word is saved to a word book with the sentence you found it in. The main difference from downloading an EPUB from the website is that there is no file format to choose. On the other hand, for books where the illustrations or the original layout matter, I think the EPUB3 from the website is the better way to read.

The catalogue is Project Gutenberg’s own, so the copyright notes above apply in the app too. There are no ads and no account, and a downloaded book reads offline. Getting Started with ABC George walks through the first book, and How to Do Extensive Reading in English covers how much to read. For Japanese books, I wrote a similar guide in What Is Aozora Bunko?