As we explained in last year’s F. Scott Fitzgerald eBooks Collection post, Australian copyright law means that the works of many 20th century authors are freely available in the public domain, despite being still under copyright in the United States and elsewhere. This is because until 2005 Australia had a ‘life of the author plus 50 years’ copyright rule, making the writing of any author who died before 1955 freely available.
Thanks to the University of Adelaide, readers in Australia now have access to free and legal eBooks archive of works by George Orwell. The books are available to be read online, downloaded as ePub files (suitable for most eReaders), and in a format accessible on Kindles.
The University of Adelaide website includes a copyright notice which we repeat here:
Under Australian copyright law, and the Free Trade agreement with the USA, copyright has expired in published works of authors who died before 1955. (Authors who died after 1954 will retain copyright for 70 years after their death.) These works are now within the “public domain” in Australia and this is why the University is able to reproduce such works on this site. However, works may still be copyright in other countries. If copyright in the work still exists in the country from which you are accessing this website, it may be illegal for you to download the work. It is your responsibility to check the applicable copyright laws in your country.
George Orwell eBooks @ Adelaide
(links direct to the University of Adelaide website)
Novels
Autobiographical Works
Essays
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- A Farthing Newspaper (1928)
- The Spike (1931)
- A Hanging (1931)
- Bookshop Memories (1936)
- Shooting an Elephant (1936)
- Spilling the Spanish Beans (1937)
- Not Counting Niggers (1939)
- Democracy in the British Army (1939)
- Marrakech (1939)
- Charles Dickens (1940)
- New Words (1940)
- Charles Reade (1940)
- Boys’ Weeklies and Frank Richards’s Reply (1940)
- Inside the Whale (1940)
- The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941)
- The Art of Donald McGill (1941)
- Wells, Hitler and the World State (1941)
- Rudyard Kipling (1942)
- Looking Back on the Spanish War (1942)
- W. B. Yeats (1943)
- Mark Twain—The Licensed Jester (1943)
- Poetry and the Microphone (1943)
- Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali (1944)
- Raffles and Miss Blandish (1944)
- Arthur Koestler (1944)
- Antisemitism in Britain (1945)
- In Defence of P.G. Wodehouse (1945)
- Notes on Nationalism (1945)
- Revenge is Sour (1945)
- You and the Atomic Bomb (1945)
- Good Bad Books (1945)
- Freedom of the Park (1945)
- The Sporting Spirit (1945)
- Nonsense Poetry (1945)
- Future of a Ruined Germany (1945)
- Why I Write (1946)
- The Prevention of Literature (1946)
- Pleasure Spots (1946)
- Decline of the English Murder (1946)
- A Nice Cup of Tea (1946)
- Politics and the English Language (1946)
- Books vs. Cigarettes (1946)
- Some Thoughts on the Common Toad (1946)
- A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray (1946)
- James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution (1946)
- Confessions of a Book Reviewer (1946)
- Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels (1946)
- How the Poor Die (1946)
- Riding Down from Bangor (1946)
- Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool (1947)
- Such, Such Were the Joys (1947)
- Writers and Leviathan (1948)
- Reflections on Gandhi (1949)
- Collected Essays (1961)
For more information about copyright law and assessing whether or not a book is in the public domain visit Project Gutenberg’s Copyright How To page.
