Collections Policy

Or, ebooks we do and don’t accept.

Standard Ebooks only works on books that have entered the U.S. public domain due to copyright expiration. Generally this means a book must have been published in or earlier, though there are exceptions for works from later periods that didn’t follow copyright formalities. For full details, see Project Gutenberg’s Copyright How-To.

Types of ebooks we do accept

• Most long fiction, including plays.

• Most short fiction and poetry, when presented in collections or omnibuses. We consider short fiction to be works less than 40,000 words in length, which typically includes novellas.

• Some “timeless” non-fiction, including philosophy and notable autobiography.

Types of ebooks we don’t accept

• Ebooks that are not clearly in the U.S. public domain. If it’s not hosted on Project Gutenberg, we’ll probably decline it.

• Individual short works that could instead be collected in a larger omnibus, like individual pamphlets, essays, or short stories. For example, we wouldn’t accept individual ebook productions of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” or Philip K. Dick’s “Mr. Spaceship.” However we do want complete compilations of those kinds of short works, for example our ebook of all of Philip K. Dick’s public domain short stories.

• Most non-fiction, including:

  • Dated non-fiction that isn’t relevant to a modern reader;

  • Histories that aren’t otherwise notable and that could be superseded by modern research (though we might accept book-length primary source historical accounts);

  • Biographies of long-forgotten people that aren’t notable;

  • Craft and science books including cookbooks, practical how-tos, instructional books, books of medicine, textbooks, books about science, books of research, or technical references;

  • Periodical or journalistic non-fiction like magazine articles, serials, newspapers, and other journalism;

  • Legal documents, including codes of law and constitutions.

  Note that we may occasionally make exceptions, for example for The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or Commentaries on the Gallic War or The Life of Samuel Johnson.

• Books that are illustration-heavy, like picture or art books, or whose content greatly depends on the arrangement of illustrations or graphics.

• Modern books that have released to the public domain, including self-published books.

• Major religious texts from modern world religions, like the Bible or the Koran, won’t be accepted. Texts about religion will usually be accepted. Texts from historical religious movements that were culturally influential but are now defunct, or are otherwise not significant in modern times, might be accepted; ask first.

• “The complete works”-type ebooks, in which an author who wrote in various styles (like poetry, short stories, and novels) has their entire corpus compiled into one ebook. However we are interested in complete collections of single types of writing. For example, Anton Chekhov wrote many plays, short stories, novels, and novellas. We wouldn’t accept “The Complete Works of Anton Chekhov,” but we would accept Anton Chekhov’s Complete Short Fiction, or individual novels or plays he wrote.

• Ebooks in translation for which we already have a translation. We aim to host one “best” version of books; for example, we already have a modern translation of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, so we won’t be accepting a different translation.

• Non-English-language books. Translations to English are, of course, OK.

• Translations into English which are severely abridged, Bowdlerized, wildly archaic or near-unreadable to modern readers, or which scholars agree are poor translations.