commercial delivery terms Ebook

A full-text digital book whose copyright has expired (or was never held), so the text can be redistributed freely.

Project Gutenberg's catalog of 79,228 ebooks, mostly pre-1929 US commercial delivery terms, is the flagship collection here.

In this catalog it appears concretely: - Project Gutenberg — "79,228 ebooks (site counter, Aug 2026)". - Internet Archive (licensing terms) — "commercial delivery terms for most scanned pre-1929 works". - Hugging Face (tagging) — "public-domain-books', 'gutenberg".

A label on a listing is not a deliverable. Teams that license on the strength of a product-name match routinely find the shipped files cover a narrower slice than they assumed, and backfilling history afterwards costs more than the license ever did.

The failure mode is concrete: the label appears in a listing, the delivered files tell a different story, and the gap surfaces mid-project when fixing it is most expensive.

You rarely have to take a vendor's word for it. 82.4% of the 1,744 datasets Datadory catalogs are free to access, and Project Gutenberg lets you inspect the real artifact before any budget is committed.

Treat every claim of this attribute as testable:

1. Open Project Gutenberg and confirm its record — "79,228 ebooks (site counter, Aug 2026)" — against the files you actually receive.
2. Read Internet Archive's record on licensing terms — "commercial delivery terms for most scanned pre-1929 works" — then confirm the delivered artifact matches before you license anything.
3. Read Hugging Face's record on tagging — "public-domain-books', 'gutenberg" — then confirm the delivered artifact matches before you license anything.
4. Pin down update cadence in writing. Across this catalog, 22.6% of 1,744 datasets refresh daily and 64 still arrive only through a manual request form, so ask exactly how fresh each release is.
5. Check whether definitions are verified at all. Field definitions are verified for 1495 of 1,744 datasets (85.7%), and any source you license should meet that bar.
6. Price the delivery route before the license. In this catalog bulk download is the most common access method (725 datasets) ahead of official APIs (574), and 379 sources still require scraping — a maintenance cost that lands on you, not the vendor.

See the term applied to real records: publishing data.

Adjacent concepts worth reading next: - controlled digital lending - marc record - ocr text