How to Download Thousands of Classic Books and Movies That Just Entered the Public Domain

You may want to check the amount of available storage space on your e-reader, because classic books by Lewis Carroll, Agatha Christie, Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf are now in the public domain. As Motherboard reports, the copyright on tens of thousands of books from 1923 expired on January 1, which means that these titles are now in the public domain and can be legally downloaded for free.

Because the copyright on works published between 1923 and 1977 is good for 95 years, this marks the first time in decades that a large number of books, movies, and songs has entered the public domain. Next year, items from 1924 will be available for download, and so on.

The list of titles up for grabs includes Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf, The Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie, The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran, The World Crisis by Winston Churchill, Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, and many more.

Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain has painstakingly listed nearly all of the new public domain works in an Excel spreadsheet, and a condensed list of the top titles is also available on its website. Unfortunately, you can’t get them all in one place, but a few reliable sources probably have what you’re looking for.

Project Gutenberg, HathiTrust, and the Internet Archive are a few of the digital libraries that let you download or read books online for free. You can also check the selections available on Read Print and The Literature Network. If those options fail, try searching for a specific title on Google Books.

A few noteworthy movies also recently entered the public domain. Some of them include Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments and Charlie Chaplin's The Pilgrim. This essentially means these films can now be shown in theaters or public screenings without fear of violating copyright laws. Some of them are also available for viewing or download on the Internet Moving Image Archive.