What Is The Public Domain?

As an illustration, suppose the fictional country of Booktonia has a copyright term of 20 years. If a book was written in 1980, the copyright protection for the book in Booktonia would have ended 20 years later, in 2000. Once the copyright in a work expires, the work is said to “fall into” the public domain. Once a work is in the public domain, the restrictions of copyright law no longer apply, and anyone may copy, reuse, or share the work as they wish.

The public domain functions as a pool of creative material from which anyone may draw. It provides authors the raw materials from which the next generation of books, movies, songs, and knowledge can be built. As the 14th century English poet Chaucer (whose work is now in the public domain) wrote, “For out of the old fields, as men say, Comes all this new corn, from year to year; And out of old books, in good faith, Comes all this new science that men learn.”

Attribution:  de Rosnay, M.D. and Berkman, F. (2011). Center for Internet & Society, Copyright and the public domain: an introduction. OpenStax CNX. Download for free at http://cnx.org/contents/adb0c17f-11b4-4c95-9957-d68a2a2af100@4.

OER Sources of Public Domain Textbooks

Faculty often find the task of selecting reading materials or textbooks for a course daunting. Instructors can ease the selection process by establishing and following criteria such as quantity, quality, accuracy, currancy, reading level, relevance, and reliability. Whether due to passion for the course topic or simply hasty decision-making, some instructors make the mistake of selecting and assigning an overwhelming amount of reading for their students. Try estimating how many minutes students will need to complete each reading assignment and adjust your selection of learning materials accordingly. Another concern is that information provided to students, especially in printed textbooks, can quickly become outdated.

Two major efforts to promote the development and sharing of public domain textbooks are Connexions and Wikibooks. Free Textbook Search allows users to search for free textbooks in 113 sites in English, German, French, Dutch or Swedish.

Connexions is a project at Rice University supported by the Hewlett Foundation to promote collaborative development, free sharing, and rapid publishing of scholarly content on the Web. Content is organized in small modules that are easily connected into larger courses. All content is free to use and reuse under the Creative Commons “attribution” license.

Wikibooks is a Wikimedia project started in 2003 with the mission to create a free collection of open-content textbooks that anyone can edit.

Collections of books that are freely available include Project Gutenberg, Read Print, Bartleby, Online Books, Electronic Text Service, and the Open Book Project.

Project Gutenberg has 20,000 free books in its Online Book Catalog and is the oldest producer of free ebooks on the Internet. The mission of Project Gutenberg is to encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks.  In an effort to promote intercultural understanding, the World Digital Library plans to make available significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, archi­tectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials.

The Assayer displays a list of textbooks that are freely available in many disciplines. For an example, see these introductory physics textbooks and Liberte, a first-year collegel French textbook. The Internet Public Library provides a comprehensive list of books that are available on the internet.  A video tour of the site is available. Examples of free available eBooks from Bartleby:

• The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction
• The Oxford Shakespeare
• Anatomy of the Human Body
• The World Factbook, 2003
• Online Sapiens

Two sources of audio books in the public domain are LibriVox and Loudlit. LibriVox provides free audiobooks from the public domain with several options for listening. Loudlit provides a text of great literary masterpieces as well as high quality audio to help readers improve their spelling, punctuation and paragraph structure. Loudlit literature includes children’s stories, poetry, short stories, and novels.

Other sources of textbook learning materials are digital collections of institutional repositories at universities and self-archiving by authors on the internet. Some of these include:

• Scholarship of the California Digital Library
• MIT textbooks
• Hofstra University Hofprints-Hofstra University E-Print Archive
• Cornell Race, Ethnicity, and Religion Project