License

The books are free, and so is what we added to them. Most of the texts are public domain; the rest are new writing of ours. That writing, the recordings, the reading pages and the designs are licensed to you under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.

The texts

Almost every text published here is in the public domain. Each title's page makes the case for that title rather than a general one: when it was first published, who translated it where there is a translator, and why it is free to publish. The reasoning differs because the facts do. Usually it turns on when the author or the translator died; sometimes on the year a translation was published, because a translation can be in copyright long after the work it translates is not; and for a few titles the answer depends on which country you are reading from.

The exception: The Odyssey in Plain English is new work, written for this library rather than found in the public domain, and published under the same CC BY 4.0 licence as everything else we make. That page says so itself.

Public-domain texts belong to everybody and nothing on this site changes that.

What we added

The narration, the reading pages, the cover designs, the typesetting and the introductions written for these editions are the work of Open Ear Books. They are published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence, CC BY 4.0.

You may copy, print, adapt and sell this material, including commercially, provided you credit the source. That is the whole condition. You do not need to ask us, and you do not owe us anything.

How to credit us

The licence asks four things of anyone who reuses this material:

• Name us: Open Ear Books, openearbooks.com. For writing of our own, name its writer too, as that title's page shows.
• Say it is licensed under CC BY 4.0, and link to the licence.
• Link to the page you took it from, where you reasonably can.
• Say if you changed it.

For example:

An extract from The Odyssey in Plain English by Harry Brown. Open Ear Books, openearbooks.com. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. Shortened for this worksheet.

Attribution is the point of choosing this licence rather than a formality attached to it. A reading page can be copied anywhere, and the credit is the only thread leading back to the rest of the library for somebody who meets one page of it somewhere else.

The images on the covers

A cover design is ours. The picture inside it usually is not. Most are public-domain paintings, photographs and illustrations, old enough that they belong to everybody; some were generated for this library. Each title's page says where its own cover image came from, under Where this comes from, so the answer is per book rather than a claim covering all of them.

What this licence does not cover

The underlying texts, and the public-domain images on the covers. They belong to everybody already, and a Creative Commons licence cannot be applied to something nobody owns. This one does not pretend to: each title's page carries its own public-domain argument, for that particular edition and that particular translator.

If anything here is unclear, please reach out to us here.