I'm thinking that maybe archive.org might be a better home for this kind of content. I can easily create plain text, web page, EPUB and PDF versions of the titles I had in mind and post them there with the appropriate license. That might also take care of the "distribution" requirement for PG too. At least the titles would be available.

James Simmons

On Wed, Jan 7, 2026 at 4:08 PM Walter Farrell via gutvol-d <gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org> wrote:

Interesting discussion.

Perhaps I missed it, and if so I'm happy to be corrected, but I don't
see anything in that policy that prohibits self-published works. It
prohibits works that are unpublished and not distributed. But many
authors self-publish by producing their books through Amazon as epub, or
even physical books via print-on-demand services. If that were done, and
then the author dedicated it to the Public Domain after at least one
copy had been purchased, wouldn't it be eligible for the main Project
Gutenberg collection?

Walt

On 1/7/2026 8:33 AM, Eric Hellman wrote:
> Note that an independent translation of a public domain work would
> itself be a self published work, and thus not eligible for the
> gutenberg.org collection, regardless of copyright status.
>
> https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/collection_development.html
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