Happy Public Domain Day!
Public Domain Day 2025 in Literature – Blog
We think that we have found another cool place to score some really good eBooks. I'm creating this post, just as a reminder of this site, which is still fresh in my memory and this will also act as a reminder. Even though I've bookmarked it, in several locations.
Around the world, people celebrate Public Domain Day on January 1, the day in which copyright expires on some older works and they enter the public domain in many different countries.
In the U.S. Constitution, copyright terms were meant to be very limited in order to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” The first copyright act, written in 1790 by the founding fathers themselves, set the term to be up to twenty-eight years.
But since then, powerful corporations have repeatedly extended the length of copyright to promote not the progress of society, but their profit. The result is that today in the U.S., work only enters the public domain ninety-five years after publication—locking our culture away for nearly a century.
2019 was the year in which new works were finally scheduled to enter the public domain, ending this long, corporate-dictated cultural winter. And as that year drew closer, it became clear that these corporations wouldn’t try to extend copyright yet again—making it the first year in almost a century in which a significant amount of art and literature once again entered the U.S. public domain, free for anyone in the U.S. to read, use, share, remix, build upon, and enjoy.
Ever since then, we’ve been celebrating Public Domain Day by preparing some of the year’s biggest literary hits for you to read on January 1.