Books Entering the Public Domain in 2022

The holidays seem to go so fast! Here we are now in 2022, and the publishers are hitting the ground running. From the vast number of books that will publish this month, we've identified 80 of particular note, 14 of which publish this week.

The New Year also sees a new batch of books enter the public domain. In the U.S. in 2022, this includes books first published in 1926, such as A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh; The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway; My Mortal Enemy by Willa Cather; Soldiers' Pay by William Faulkner; Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence; an early novel by Georgette Heyer, These Old Shades; a slew of novels from the prolific Edgar Wallace; and other works by a veritable who's who of early 20th century authors including Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ford Maddox Ford, C. S. Forester, Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov, Dorothy L. Sayers and H. G. Wells.

Copyright law varies by country, so works that are freely available in one country are not necessarily so in others. To give you a hint of the complexities, in the U.S. there have been two major changes to copyright law since the 1970s: Works published before 1978 are now protected for 95 years from publication, but those published after 1978 are generally protected for the author's life + 70 years. Eventually, this will bring U.S. copyright law broadly into line with Europe, where most countries recognize life + 70 years, but will leave both Europe and the U.S. with much longer copyright periods than most countries in Africa and Asia, where books generally enter the public domain 50 years after an author's death.

You can see more books entering the public domain in 2022 at publicdomainreview.org.

With best wishes for the new year,

Davina Morgan-Witts,
BookBrowse Publisher