Standard Ebooks
- Free allowance
- Free, public-domain, carefully produced ebooks.
- Verdict
- caveatusable, with a named limit or an unprobed read path
- Cost
- free tier
- Identity
- anonymousno card, no phone
- Binding limit
- noneno named constraint binds
- Evidence
- documented6 sources; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-11-23checked 2026-10-23 (live); stale on 2026-11-23
| Free tier | Free, public-domain, carefully produced ebooks. unit unlimited; metered on none; No byte or title count is published on the site; 1,541 is the GitHub repository count, which includes non-book tooling repos. |
|---|---|
| Price | USD 0 |
| Limits |
The paywall on bulk ZIPs is a membership gate, not one of the seven vocabulary kinds: it is a purchase, not a rate, a quota or an identity check. The Atom feed also refused an anonymous client with 401, so feed-based crawling is closed. |
| Binding | none Nothing in the vocabulary fails at 1 TiB/month because the catalogue is far smaller than that: roughly 1,500 books at about 1 MB each is under 2 GB. The ceiling is corpus size, not service policy. |
| Identity | anonymous No account for per-book downloads or for git clone. A Patrons Circle membership (paid) is the only registration-like gate, and it buys the bulk ZIPs only. |
| Egress | Per-book downloads are free and unmetered. Bulk ZIPs of whole collections are not: 'Access to our bulk downloads is a benefit of Patrons circle membership', a paid donation tier. The Atom feed at /feeds/atom/all answered 401 to an anonymous client on 2026-10-23. free allowance: no byte allowance published; bulk ZIPs are paywalled, per-book files are not |
| Per-object cap | not applicable: one EPUB/AZW3/KEPUB per book; the measured EPUB is 831,959 bytes |
| Retention | permanent: a curated public-domain catalogue, each book also held as a public git repository |
| Interface | rest, git, cli HTTPS per book, and a two-hop download: /ebooks/<author>/<title>/downloads/<file>.epub returns an HTML 'Your Download Has Started!' page carrying a meta refresh to the same path with ?source=download, which is the actual file. Each title is also a public git repository under github.com/standardebooks. |
| Tooling | git clone of the per-book repository is the only bulk path that needs no donation; wget/curl with the two-hop pattern works per book. |
| Composes with | Small, high-quality text corpus to pair with Gutenberg's 2.44 TB when typography matters; the git repos give clean XHTML source that a diff pipeline can track. |
| Reliability | The direct .epub URL silently returns 200 with an HTML redirect page instead of the file; a client that trusts the status code saves a 8,777-byte web page as a book. The ?source=download hop is required. |
| Notes | The caveat is bulk only: the free path is one book at a time or one git clone at a time. The abandoned route was 'download the Atom feed and walk it' - the feed answered 401. |
| Evidence note | documented The per-book EPUB was downloaded and hashed here; the paywall and the 401 on the feed were observed. Catalogue size is the one soft number - the 1,541 repository count is a proxy, not a title count. |
| Parsed numbers |
|
Evidence 6
| date | source | what it proved |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-23 | standardebooks.org/about | not published |
| 2026-10-23 | standardebooks.org/bulk-downloads | 'Access to our bulk downloads is a benefit of Patrons circle membership' - ZIP bulk is a paid tier |
| 2026-10-23 | api.github.com/orgs/standardebooks/repos?per_page=1&type=pub | Link header page=1541: 1,541 public repositories, the per-book git path |
| 2026-10-23 | probe: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/jane-austen/pride-and-prejudice/downloads/jane-austen_pride-and-prejudice.epub | 200 with 8,777 bytes of application/xhtml+xml - an HTML 'Your Download Has Started!' page, not an EPUB; false-200 shape |
| 2026-10-23 | probe: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/jane-austen/pride-and-prejudice/downloads/jane-austen_pride-and-prejudice.epub?source=download | 200, 831,959 bytes, application/epub+zip, sha256 85814417c1a74d2ca7f3b077b47454d0cfc728392d40d846d1c97d44f24c5279 |
| 2026-10-23 | probe: https://standardebooks.org/feeds/atom/all | 401 to an anonymous client - the catalogue feed is not public |
More fields 4
| epub sha256 | 85814417c1a74d2ca7f3b077b47454d0cfc728392d40d846d1c97d44f24c5279 |
|---|---|
| epub bytes | 831959 |
| github repos | 1541 |
| atom feed status | 401 |