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 It prohibits works that are unpublished and not distributed.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