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EnglishWhat public-domain books has Beej digitized and preserved?
Updated
Beej (Brian "Beej Jorgensen" Hall) lists three digitized public-domain books on the Books section of his home page, available as direct downloads in EPUB or PDF format. According to the page, "one of my hobbies is digitizing and preserving public-domain books," so this is a personal preservation project rather than a commercial catalog.
The digitized books
| Title | Author / Subject | Format |
|---|---|---|
| Across America on a Motor Bicycle | George Wyman's account of being the first person to take a motor vehicle across the US | EPUB |
| Propaganda | Edward Bernays; described on the page as "a still relevant book" | EPUB |
| The Palminomicon | Collected Palm Pilot programming lore |
Across America on a Motor Bicycle
George Wyman's first-person account of the first motor-vehicle crossing of the United States. Useful if you're interested in early motorcycle or overland travel history, or in primary-source accounts of early 20th-century American roads.
Propaganda
Edward Bernays's book on mass persuasion and public relations. Beej's page flags it as still relevant, which is a fair description given how often the book is cited in media and communications studies.
The Palminomicon
Not a public-domain literary work in the same sense as the other two — it's a collection of Palm Pilot programming lore compiled as a PDF. It fits the site's broader retro-computing and preservation theme rather than the public-domain book project specifically.
How to get them
- Go to beej.us and find the Books section on the home page.
- Click the format link next to the title you want (EPUB for the first two, PDF for The Palminomicon).
- Open the file in any EPUB reader or PDF viewer.
The page presents these as direct downloads with no described paywall, account, or checkout step. That said, the page itself doesn't state licensing terms for the digitized editions, so if you plan to redistribute rather than just read them, verify the underlying work's public-domain status in your own jurisdiction first.
Related items on the same page
The Books section also links to two personal lists — Books I've read and my vocab flashcards — which are reading logs rather than digitized texts. If your interest is Beej's own writing rather than his preservation work, the Stuff to Learn section (Beej's Guides, My tech blog) is the relevant part of the site.