It's truly a miracle of this age that anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can access and study hundreds of years of humanity's intellectual legacy, thanks to free culture projects such as Project Gutenberg.

But I realised there's not enough information on this area of the Internet. I'm pretty sure there would be more places that have made valuable works freely accessible (gratis or libre), but I haven't yet found a good catalogue of them.

So, where do you find public domain works? Feel free to share anything you use; niche websites are very much welcomed.

Here's some ideas I have in mind:

• Where do you get public domain musical recordings or sheet music?
• Historical newspapers and magazines?
• Digital photographs of paintings, or 3D models of historical buildings and sculptures?
• Literature in any specific language other than English?
• How do you make use of such public domain works? What do you actually do with them?

... to get things started, here's my own list:

WikipediaWikipedia

This would be also pretty obvious for some, but Wikipedia (or rather, Wikimedia Commons) is also famous for hoarding copyright-expired films. They celebrate the public domain day on 1 January every year, and they have "${year} in public domain" articles which track works that go into public domain in each year.

In my case, the 1930 film All Quiet on the Western Front caught my attention last year, then I noticed its copyright was still in effect but was set to expire in 2026. So I waited for the new year to come, and enjoyed the movie on Wikipedia for this year's public domain day (actually very good film). So I highly suggest to check out on Wikipedia if you happen to watch old movies.

Early Modern TextsEarly Modern Texts

Early Modern Texts is another great website I visit most often to read philosophical works.
It is created by philosopher Jonathan Bennett with the objective of making early modern philosophical texts more accessible to current readers.
The website hosts many works by major philosophers in 16-18th century such as Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, and Kant, prepared with a view to making them easier to read while leaving intact the main arguments, doctrines, and lines of thought.

Here's the editor's rationale from the FAQ:

Why Translate The Texts?Why Translate The Texts?

When students are introduced to the great philosophical works of the early modern period, it is usually in the hope that they will engage with the thoughts and arguments that the texts present. The teaching experience of many of us suggests that most students simply cannot understand these texts. The increasing rate of change in the English language ensures that fewer and fewer of today’s readers can cope with the writings of the 16th-18th centuries. There are difficulties of syntax, length and complexity of sentences, words that are no longer current, still-familiar words used in meanings that they now do not have, arcane references to other philosophers which today’s students will seldom understand or be required to follow up; these and other factors create forbidding obstacles to engaging with these early modern texts. I reduce the obstacles so that students can more easily come to grips with the philosophical thoughts the texts express. Once they do that, they still won’t have an easy time, because the material itself is hard; but their efforts will go into getting philosophical understanding, not decoding old prose.

My versions are faithful to the content of the originals, but are plainer and more straightforward in manner. I could have made them even plainer, but that would have taken them further than I wanted to go from the stylistic feel of the originals. I love the original texts, and am glad to have spent years wrestling with them in their pristine form. I do wish, though, that through the years I could also have read them sometimes with all my energy going into the philosophy.

An average student, when required to read a stylistically difficult text, will either (1) confess defeat, or (2) glide along the surface of the text, getting a vague sense of having understood it. The greater disaster is (2). When so much in our world and indeed in our educational practices seduces people away from close and precise attention to the written word, it would be a sorry thing if this seduction were furthered by philosophy, which ought to be its most implacable enemy.

Aozora BunkoAozora Bunko

If you can read Japanese, then you would already know Aozora Bunko (青空文庫) is where you can find out-of-copyright Japanese books. Japan has many great writers in the early 20th century, so you can have good time reading them.

One problem is that the website only provides texts in XHTML or TXT files in an obsolete character encoding (Shift-JIS), so you'd have to look for some conversion tools in order to read them on your ereader.
Here's what I have found on this so far:

• https://aozora.orihasam.com hosts texts on Aozora Bunko converted to .epub and .azw3 files.
• https://github.com/adamay909/AozoraConvert/tree/main/v2 is the command-line tool the above website uses to convert texts.

The Ludwig Wittgenstein ProjectThe Ludwig Wittgenstein Project

This is another interesting project I found while studying philosophy.
70 years after Wittgenstein's death in 1951, The Ludwig Wittgenstein Project was launched in 2022 to make Ludwig Wittgenstein's published writings which are now out of copyright available free of charge and with a free licence.

One thing to note is due to the complicated copyright status of Wittgenstein's works,
some works are only available in certain languages (for example, Wittgenstein's second major work, Philosophical Investigations, is only available in German), or are not available at all until the terms expire for the translators or the editors of the texts.

Nevertheless, they have done all they can to make everything available current copyright system allows us to, and they are definitely worth to be credited for all the volunteer work and investigations.

Forgive me for some slips in the writing as it's my first time posting on stasher. I'm happy to see everyone's thinking in the comments!