Sources
The books that ship inside Robin Reading, for a rights holder, a reviewer, or anyone asking where a bundled book came from.
Robin Reading ships with seventeen books. Every one of them is in the public domain in the United States, the United Kingdom and every country whose term is the author's life plus 70 years. A few countries keep longer terms; Where terms run longer below names the books still protected there, and until when.
- The United States bar: the work was published before 1931. The latest on the shelf is The Great Gatsby (1925), public domain in the US since 1 January 2021.
- The life-plus-70 bar: every author, and every translator, died in 1955 or earlier. The latest deaths are H. G. Wells and Constance Garnett (both 1946), public domain from 1 January 2017.
- A translator is an author with their own clock. The one translated book, Crime and Punishment, is Constance Garnett's 1914 translation (d. 1946). No later translation is used.
Where the editions come from
Every book is the Standard Ebooks edition. Standard Ebooks releases its production work under the CC0 1.0 Universal public-domain dedication, which permits commercial bundling without attribution. Their name and logo are reserved; Robin Reading uses no Standard Ebooks logo, names them only as the source, and does not suggest their endorsement. The "Transcribed from" column shows the upstream transcription each Standard Ebooks edition names in its own metadata (dc:source).
Robin Reading changes each file in three ways before bundling it. It does not change the text of the book:
- It removes Standard Ebooks' own title page, half-title, imprint, colophon and "uncopyright" page, together with their logo images.
- It shrinks the cover image to 400 × 600 pixels.
- It removes the endnote link markers (the endnote text itself stays).
Each book is fetched from the Standard Ebooks address in the table below and changed only in those three ways, so the shelf can be rebuilt from those addresses at any time.
The shelf
"Life+70 clear since" is the first 1 January on which the author, and the translator if there is one, had been dead for seventy full years.
Where terms run longer
Spain (the author's life plus 80 years, for authors who died before 7 December 1987) and Colombia (life plus 80 years) protect three books on the shelf until 1 January 2027: The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds (H. G. Wells, died 1946) and the Garnett translation of Crime and Punishment (Constance Garnett, died 1946). Every other book on the shelf is in the public domain in both countries today. Until then, Robin Reading is not offered in Spain or Colombia.
What the app does with other books
Robin Reading opens only DRM-free EPUB files the reader already has. It does not remove, bypass or work around any copy protection, and it cannot open a protected file. It has no store, no catalogue and no download feature for books, and it has no servers of its own to send anything to.
The dictionary
The built-in dictionary is derived from English Wiktionary and is offered under CC BY-SA 4.0, the licence of Wiktionary's text. The app credits Wiktionary on its About screen. The dictionary, the script that builds it and its licence note can be downloaded from robinreading.com/dictionary.
If you believe something here is yours
Write to the support address on robinreading.com and name the book. We answer within two working days. If a claim holds up, the book comes out in the next build.