How we select books

A book reaches a full page on this site only after five steps. Most of the titles in our catalog are still somewhere in the middle of that pipeline, which is why they appear as plain records.

1. Import from the official catalog

We read Project Gutenberg's published catalog files (the weekly CSV and the daily RDF archive) rather than crawling its website, and we fetch book files from an official mirror with a rate limit and an identifying user agent. This follows Project Gutenberg's own guidance on automated access. Each record keeps its Gutenberg ID, title, authors with life dates, languages, subject headings, bookshelves, release date, rights statement and the list of available formats.

2. Automatic rights assessment

The importer records Project Gutenberg's rights statement ("Public domain in the USA" or a licence note) and checks the death year of every author, translator, illustrator and editor on the record. If all of them died more than 70 years ago, the work is marked as likely public domain worldwide as well. If any contributor died more recently or has no recorded date, the work is marked as US-only and held for a human decision. Works carrying a copyright notice are never hosted here.

3. Human rights sign-off

An editor confirms the assessment, checks the licence text inside the file, records the decision and the date. Only then can the book's files be published on this site.

4. Editorial writing

A fact brief is prepared from the catalog record and reference sources. The editor writes the introduction, context, suitability notes and edition notes, following the editorial policy. Genres are assigned by hand; we do not map subject headings automatically.

5. Review and publication

A second pass checks the text against the sources, confirms the publication year, verifies that the download files open, and marks the page as reviewed. Only reviewed books appear in genre pages, reading lists, author lists and the sitemap. If a problem is reported later, the book can be suspended or removed within minutes; see takedown requests.

Why some famous books are missing

Either the work is not yet public domain in the United States, a contributor (often a translator) died too recently for us to be comfortable about other countries, or nobody has written about it yet. The catalog page for each title explains which of these applies.