About Public Domain Pulp, The World's Greatest Website

Public Domain Pulp is…

Free

Books in the public domain are free, so their visual novel counterparts should be too. You can read them all here: no payment, no account, no nothing required.

Unabridged

This website steals from the best. (And also Steinbeck.)

All visual novels keep the original text of their respective books. There's no modifying*, simplifying, or bowdlerizing of prose.

Open Source

This website's code is MIT-0 licensed, and its text and image contents are all CC0 licensed — these being the public domain dedication licenses.

Each visual has its own public Github repository for cloning, building, and reading offline. (They're all just static html pages!)

Growing

The primary goal of Public Domain Pulp is to have a visual novel for each famous novel in the public domain.

To that end, new VNs are steadily being added from the gigantic backlog of books already available, and new VNs will continue to be added from the additional books entering public domain each new year.

Open for Contributions

The secondary goal of Public Domain Pulp is to make each visual novel the best possible (unabridged) adaptation of its source text: accurate, consistent, visually pleasing, and visually readable.

To that end, all the VN repositories are open for contributions for improvements. See the README.md #contributing section if interested, which includes details on how to generate images in the correct consistent style. (If ever there was a good use case for AI-generated visuals, collaborative contribution-enabling is it.)

Entertaining

Hopefully.

Books, despite being the best-written medium, remain on a slow yet inevitable decline into pathetic irrelevancy.

At the same time, visual novels are an inherently more engaging medium, but are plagued by universally horrendous prose.

Combining the best qualities of both (along with sprinkling in some optional editorializing in the "press E" mode), if done correctly, could elevate books back into being competitively entertaining. Not universally, and not perfectly, but perhaps an improvement on the margin.

Hopefully.

Open for Donations

Not yet. But maybe eventually, to find a way for the site to recover the time-costs of editing and the API-costs of generating.

For now though, just donate to Standard Ebooks instead, where the site's texts are largely sourced from.