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December 2025

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Project Gutenberg Newsletter for December 2025
by John Guagliardo 01 Dec '25

01 Dec '25

PROJECT GUTENBERG NEWSLETTER DECEMBER 2025 — Enjoy these eBooks. Share them. Celebrate them. — == CONTENTS == * Illustration of Greg Newby and Michael Hart * In the News about eBooks for November 2025 * Legal News: eBook Lending and Copyright * Anticipation Builds for Public Domain Day 2026 * Top 100 eBooks downloaded for the month of November * PG AI Audiobooks Coming Soon! * Project Gutenberg Self Publishing Portal * Recent PG Releases * Join Distributed Proofreaders * Find Project Gutenberg on Social Media == Celebrating Greg Newby in Illustration == On behalf of all of us at PGLAF, we sincerely appreciate the illustrated likeness of Michael Hart and Gregory Newby. Note about the illustration, illustrator Denis Renard, and publication by Marie Lebert. > link: <https://marielebert.wordpress.com/2022/10/07/denis-renard/> == In the news about eBooks for November 2025 == Key eBook news items and trends as November 2025 include: AI and Copyright Lawsuits: There is news about publisher OverDrive suing OpenAI over AI training data and related copyright issues, a significant development for authors concerned about intellectual property rights. Audiobook Growth: The rise in consumer demand for audiobooks means entrepreneurial authors and publishers are embracing an "audio-first" trend, seeking to leverage advances against audio rights while potentially self-publishing eBooks separately. Spotify has expanded audiobook access for Premium subscribers in five additional European countries. == Legal News: eBook Lending and Copyright == A significant legal development in late 2024 involved the Internet Archive's legal battle over its digital lending practices. The organization decided not to appeal a U.S. Court of Appeals ruling that found its "controlled digital lending" (CDL) model, which involved lending scanned digital copies of physical books, was not a "fair use" under copyright law. The case, Hachette Book Group, Inc. v. Internet Archive, was a closely watched dispute involving major publishers and had a significant impact on how libraries approach digital lending of copyrighted materials. AI and Copyright Tensions: Mid-November saw heated debates on X about AI training data, with authors accusing OpenAI of scraping books (including public domain ones) without consent. A related lawsuit gained traction, potentially affecting how AI models handle free eBooks. November's X conversations about PG had some trending, with users recommending Gutenberg for classics like Dracula and Meditations. A viral thread noted how public domain status means "no fees, no licenses," sparking eBook recommendation lists. == Anticipation Builds for Public Domain Day 2026 == In November 2025, the primary focus in public domain eBooks news centered on the impending Public Domain Day on January 1, 2025, when thousands of works from 1929 (plus 1924 sound recordings) entered into the U.S. public domain. This event has generated significant buzz among digital libraries, authors, and readers, with platforms like Project Gutenberg and Standard eBooks preparing free eBook releases. Discussions emphasized how these additions will enrich free digital collections, allowing unrestricted sharing, adaptation, and remixing of classics. Here's a breakdown of the Major Works Entering the Public Domain: These titles, now free for eBooks distribution and adaptation, include literary heavyweights from the late 1920s. Highlights featured in November: Ernest Hemingway’s, A Farewell to Arms, Iconic war novel; expected to see new eBooks editions and adaptations. Virginia Woolf’s, A Room of One's Own. Feminist essay; poised for fresh digital annotations and audiobooks. William Faulkner’s, The Sound and the Fury. Modernist masterpiece; highlights the "Roaring '20s" cultural wave entering free access. Agatha Christie’s The Seven Dials Mystery. Early detective story; boosts mystery genre. Dashiell Hammett’s, The Maltese Falcon. Hardboiled noir classic; anticipated for graphic novel and eBook remixes. Other notables include All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque and early Tintin comics by Hergé. Sound recordings like George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue == Top 10 eBooks downloaded for the month of November == Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (303,221) Moby Dick; Or, The Whale by Herman Melville (119,658) Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (85,862) The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers (76,744) Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare (73,678) The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (65,938) Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (63,702) The Complete Works of William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare (57,775) Middlemarch by George Eliot (53,818) A Room with a View by E. M. Forster (53,757) == PG AI Audiobooks coming soon! == The next-generation of PG audiobooks is coming soon. There will likely be two audiobooks per book (one male and one female). Feedback and demand have been positive. We are looking forward to continuing this collaboration. The team of talented, and bright collaborators, have recently made some great progress on a v2 version of the open audiobook collection. They have been working on for the past few months to expand the collection to all 70K books, through the use of LLMs to automatically determine what should be read aloud and what should not be. Unlike the previous effort, which involved a lot of manual cleaning effort, this new effort will automate that with a series of LLM prompts so that we can automatically read things more like a human would. The AI audiobooks use some newer speech models to generate recordings, and tackle the issue of male and female voices. == Project Gutenberg Self Publishing Portal == Free Public Access to Create and Distribute eBooks via the Project Gutenberg Self Publishing system. Project Gutenberg has focused mostly on the re-creation of paper books rather than the distribution of new authors and material, and we have spent as much of our time on finding books and doing copyright research as on eBook creation and distribution. Project Gutenberg Self Publishing Portal focuses solely on distribution rather than creation. In 2011 Michael Hart and John Guagliardo created the Project Gutenberg Self Publishing Portal and Author’s Community, https://self.gutenberg.org. Since then we have published over 20,000 titles. For the month of November there were 107 titles submitted and 73 approved, https://self.gutenberg.org/RecentPublications. If you or anyone you know, ever wished to have their title published at Project Gutenberg, visit https://self.gutenberg.org and join the author’s community. It is also a great place to find thousands of contemporary self-published titles. == Join Distributed Proofreaders == Visit pgdp.net to learn how to create eBooks for Project Gutenberg. Proofreading a page a day is easy, fun, and a great way to help bring literature to the digital world. There are a variety of roles for the different steps involved in digitizing a printed book to make a Project Gutenberg eBook. Beginners are welcome, and there is an online tutorial to get started. <http://pgdp.net> == Selected New Releases at Gutenberg.org - November 2025 == In the last month PGLAF added another 211 new public domain eBooks to the PG catalog. Of these 136 were added by PGDP. Thank you to all the volunteers who have helped to make these new titles freely available to the world. These eBooks are now available at: <http://gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?sort_order=release_date> A selection of this month’s notable titles: Flaxius: Leaves from the Life of an Immortal, Leland, Charles Godfrey (English) 334 pages; Monday, December 1, 2025 PG #77376 <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77376> The brave little maid of Goldau (1892), Mary Elizabeth Jennings (English) 47 pages; Monday, December 1, 2025 PG #77374 <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77374> Brake Up; or, The Young Peacemakers, Optic, Oliver (English) 318 pages; Monday, December 1, 2025 PG #77372 <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77372> Hold 'Em, Wyndham!, Barbour, Ralph Henry (English) 285 pages; Monday, December 1, 2025 PG #77370 <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77370> Skum [1922], Øberg, Edith (Norwegian) 137 pages; Monday, December 1, 2025 PG #77368 <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77368> Among the Isles of Shoals, Thaxter, Celia (English) 193 pages; Saturday, November 29, 2025 PG #77366 <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77366> Bound to get there; or, A boy who could not be downed, Franklin, Roy (English) 324 pages; Saturday, November 29, 2025 PG #77365 <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77365> Les conversations d'Émilie, Épinay, Louise d' (French) 208 pages; Saturday, November 29, 2025 PG #77364 <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77364> Genesis (1910), A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on, Skinner, John, 1851-1925. (English) 671 pages; Saturday, November 29, 2025 PG #77363 <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77363> Adrift on the Amazon, Miller, Leo (English) 286 pages; Friday, November 28, 2025 PG #77361 <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77361> American medicinal barks, Henkel, Alice (English) 61 pages; Friday, November 28, 2025 PG #77360 <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77360> Letters of John Huss, written during his exile and imprisonment, Bonnechose, Émile de (English) 248 pages; Friday, November 28, 2025 PG #77359 <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77359> A lady's cruise in a French man-of-war [1882], Gordon-Cumming, Constance Frederica (English) 397 pages; Friday, November 28, 2025 PG #77356 <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77356> Household words, no. 330, July 19, 1856: A weekly journal, Dickens, Charles (editor) (English) 48 pages; Friday, November 28, 2025 PG #77354 <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77354> Historia de la instrucción pública en Puerto Rico hasta el año de 1898, Coll y Toste, Cayetano (Spanish) 212 pages; Friday, November 28, 2025 PG #77353 <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77353> Ten years in a Portsmouth slum, Dolling, Robert R. (English) 318 pages; Friday, November 28, 2025 PG #77351 <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77351> Bacchus; or, Wine To-day and To-morrow, Shand, P. Morton (English with French) 96 pages; Thursday, November 27, 2025 PG #77340 <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77340> The English works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, vol 6 of 11, Hobbes, Thomas (English) 540 pages; Wednesday, November 26, 2025 PG #77338 <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77338> Leben und Taten des scharfsinnigen Edlen Don Quijote von la Mancha 1 {Fraktur}, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Übers.: Tieck) (German) 379 pages; Wednesday, November 26, 2025 PG #77337 <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77337> Hecuba and Other Plays, Euripides; Michael Wodhull [tr.] (English) 288 pages; Wednesday, November 26, 2025 PG #77336 <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77336> Poems: Scots and English, Buchan, John (English with Scots) 107 pages; Tuesday, November 25, 2025 PG #77335 <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77335> El proceso, Franz Kafka (Spanish) 385 pages; Tuesday, November 25, 2025 PG #77334 <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77334> Green Thursday: Stories, Peterkin, Julia M. (English) 189 pages; Tuesday, November 25, 2025 PG #77332 <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77332> The way of all earth, Delano, Edith Barnard (English) 283 pages; Tuesday, November 25, 2025 PG #77331 <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77331> La rive d'Asie, Anet, Claude (French) 240 pages; Monday, November 24, 2025 PG #77330 <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77330> The Best Short Stories of 1925, and the Yearbook of the American Short Story, O'Brien, Edward J. [ed.] (English) 520 pages; Monday, November 24, 2025 PG #77328 <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77328> The work of the War refugees committee, Shaw, Flora L. (English) 43 pages; Monday, November 24, 2025 PG #77327 <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77327> Insomnia: Its causes and cure, Sawyer, James (English) 66 pages; Monday, November 24, 2025 PG #77326 <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77326> Bernini, and other studies in the history of art, Norton, Richard (English) 367 pages; Monday, November 24, 2025 PG #77325 <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77325> The Dark Year of Dundee (1867), Alcock, Deborah (English) 350 pages; Monday, November 24, 2025 PG #77324 <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77324> The list of registered, operational mirrors is here: <http://gutenberg.org/MIRRORS.ALL> == Find Project Gutenberg on social media == Facebook: http://facebook.com/project.gutenberg Facebook New eBooks: http://facebook.com/gutenberg.new Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@gutenberg_org Mastodon New eBooks: https://mastodon.social/@gutenberg_new Bluesky: <https://bsky.app/profile/gutenberg.org> Bluesky New eBooks: <https://bsky.app/profile/new.gutenberg.org> Reddit: <https://reddit.com/r/ProjectGutenberg> Thanks to the Project Gutenberg Social Media Team for keeping these feeds interesting!

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