Books Available at Faded Page or PG-Australia

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This article discusses issues related to books that are not on the U.S.-based Project Gutenberg site, but that are available at another archive, usually due to differences in national copyright law.

The two most commonly asked-about sites (for books in English) are Faded Page and PG-Australia.

  • Project Gutenberg Australia is a site posting books in the public domain in Australia. They do not have an active volunteer community but they are an active archive.

There is a brief discussion in the Official Documentation on how to transfer books available at Faded Page. This article goes into more detail about the issues and how to handle books at other archives, like PG-Australia.

Copyright Basics: The US, Canada, and Australia

In 1886, the Berne Convention established an international standard of copyright, with works entering into the public domain 50 years after the author's death. This was the law in Australia until 2004 and in Canada until 2022; both countries now protect works for 70 years after the death of the author.

The United States was, for a long time, an outlier in international copyright law, because it based copyright protections on the date of publication rather than on the date of the author's death. While the U.S. has also now adopted a life-plus-70 rule, for works first published before 1978, copyright extends for 95 years after publication.

This means that there are some works that enter the public domain either earlier or later in the United States than in Canada and Australia. Consider this example. A disclaimer: this example ignores nuances involving copyright renewals and other formalities, multi-author works, and unpublished and posthumously published works. 

George Bernard Shaw published his first play, Widowers' Houses, in 1893. He continued publishing plays for the next fifty years, with Buoyant Billons appearing in 1948, shortly before his death in 1950 at the age of 94.

Widowers' Houses entered the public domain in the United States no later than 1949, at which time the U.S. copyright term was only 56 years from publication. Because Shaw was still alive, it remained under copyright in Berne Convention countries.

All of Shaw's published plays entered the public domain in Canada and Australia in 2001, 50 years after Shaw's death, since both countries were then based on a life-plus-fifty system.

However, many of Shaw's later plays remain under copyright in the U.S. as they were written and published fewer than 95 years ago. Under current law, Buoyant Billions, first published in 1948, will not enter the U.S. public domain until January 1, 2044.

Thus, before 2000 some of Shaw's plays were in the public domain in the U.S., but not in Canada. In 2000, all entered the public domain in Canada, but some will still be in copyright in the U.S. for decades to come.

This is why sometimes, when a book enters the public domain in the U.S., there will already be a text available through a site like Faded Page or PG-Australia.

Running Books from International Sites at DP

In general, books published at Faded Page, or in process at DP-Canada, are treated like books that have already been published at Project Gutenberg: We do not re-run them here at DP unless there is a good reason to: for example, a new translation, new or different illustrations, or significant problems with the existing test.

There is no formal policy for books at PG-Australia or any other site, and our tools do not check those sites. It is up to the individual project manager whether it makes more sense to try to republish a book from another site or to run a new edition through DP from scratch.

Republishing Books from International Sites at PG-US

While you cannot run these books at Distributed Proofreaders, Project Gutenberg will accept them if you submit them to their site individually. There is an overview of the process in the Content Providing FAQ. However, there is one big pitfall you will need to avoid first: the edition used.

Copyright and Editions

Remember: in Canada, Australia, and other Berne Convention countries, most or all of an author's work enters the public domain at once. This also means that copyright expires on every edition and revision of a work at once.

In the United States, this is not the case; every edition of a work has its own copyright and enters the public domain separately.

This means that, when clearing a project for Project Gutenberg, you need to know which printed edition was used to create it.

This creates three issues:

First, this information may not be available. While books at Faded Page often include title pages and similar information, not every book includes that information, and books at PG-Australia rarely or never do. In that case you may need to do more research to establish the edition used. Sometimes this is easy--for example, a government report issued in a particular year, or a book that has never been reprinted. Sometimes it may take more in-depth research. Unless you can identify a specific public domain edition used to create a text, you cannot clear and submit it at Project Gutenberg.

Second, even if you know what edition was used, images of the title page and verso, which are needed for copyright clearance, may not be available. If the files were originally prepared from a physical book, you will need to locate a copy of that specific edition of the book for clearance.

Third, the edition used may not be in the U.S. public domain; for example, rather than a first edition, it may be based on a revised or collected edition. In this case the international text cannot be cleared and submitted as is at Project Gutenberg.

In either case, the lack of clear edition information may justify re-running the text at DP. If in doubt, ask on the No Dumb Questions thread for Content Providers.

Other Sites

There are other sites that may contain etexts not found at Project Gutenberg or Faded Page:

  • The Online Books Page is a general listing of texts available online, either as images or text.
  • Standard Ebooks produces public domain epub editions. Most are based on PG texts, but sometimes they include text not available elsewhere.
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