Public Domain Day 2026

JAN 01, 2026

Happy Public Domain Day 2026.

Today seems the appropriate day to declare the Public Domain Pulp site online. Not necessarily ready — since it needs more development work and more titles — but at least online.

It would make sense to inaugurate the site today by announcing a book from 1930, now that those have all just entered the public domain. That's what Standard Ebooks just did, showing off with an impressive 20 new titles in their Public Domain Day post. However, that presents a problem for me, not having access to the source epub until the day of. And I can't turn around a full book conversion in one day — at least not yet.

So, a book from 1929 will have to do for now.

Announcing Cup of Gold: The Visual Novel

For the site's first visual novel, I went with the debut book of an author I like: John Steinbeck. Cup of Gold: A Life of Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer, with Obnoxiously Long Full Title wasn't a book I'd read before. In fact, I forgot it even existed until I went searching for titles published in 1929, despite being a big enough fan to have visited the "Slimbech" Center in Salinas:

Cup of Gold is amateurish prose-wise. It doesn't really read like a Steinbeck novel and is overall dubious in premise (though Dubious in Battle In Dubious Battle is probably still the more boring read). The Goodreads blurb claims the book adds "new dimensions to readers' perceptions of this all-American writer," which I agree with — as a backhanded compliment.

Nevertheless, Cup of Gold: The Visual Novel now exists. I believe it is the first-ever public domain visual novel (or CC0 visual novel of a public domain text, to be precise).

Certainly, it's the first one I've made for this project, and that does show in some of the VN editing. Much like early Steinbeck, I've still got a lot to learn when it comes to making a good, entertaining final product. But it is readable, viewable — technically valid, at least. And free!

The Process and The Plan

Unlike Steinbeck, my role is not writing the fiction (a career I could never pursue, because I'm not insane), but developing the process for converting existing fiction into quality visual novels. Figuring out that process is ongoing. The creation of this first one took several weeks — longer than expected — and required significant manual input.

Over time, as the codebase and conversion process stabilize, it should become much more efficient. The images are obviously already created by AI (with manual curation), but to get fast book-to-VN turnarounds, the metadata process will need to be more AI-driven too. I think parts of that are doable. Other aspects of the metadata — particularly those dealing with visuals — might require manual entry for some time yet.

Whatever it takes to get there, the plan is to get all the major famous works of the public domain converted into readable (playable?) VNs. To have a catalogue as big as Standard Ebooks. As big as Gutenberg! As big as HathiTrust! (Maybe not that last one.)

So huzzah for Public Domain Day. Drink up some Captain Morgan rum in celebration of Cup of Gold's protagonist, Captain Henry Morgan — even if it's the wrong year for 2026.

But works from 1930 and many other years will soon be forthcoming. The best-written visual novels in existence will soon all be on this site (and open source on Github).