The public domain imprint

A second life for books, on print’s own terms

Bulk scanning is reaching books that exist almost nowhere else — held in a handful of libraries, digitised once, then trained on and forgotten. Folium publishes them for human readers.

Get in touch How it works
folium

Latin, leaf. The root of folio, foliation, and every page number ever printed.

Why we exist

A book that survived a century on paper should not end its existence as an unread file in a database.

Some of what is being scanned today is public domain, and some of that exists in no digital form anywhere else. Once it has been read by a machine, it should be read by people too.

The exchange

How a scanned book comes back to readers

  1. 01

    Print is scanned

    Books arrive in bulk to be scanned. Some are public domain, and some of those exist in no digital form anywhere.

  2. 02

    The whole run is enriched

    Every page is made structured and citable. The organisation that scanned it gets that improved text back.

  3. 03

    The public domain is published

    With permission, the public domain titles are released as Folium editions for human readers.

Nobody loses anything. The training data gets better, and a little more of the written record stays in human hands.

Publishing, press and libraries

Different doors into the same books

Libraries

Your holdings, read again

If a title sits in your collection and almost nowhere else, we would like to talk about how it reaches readers.

Publishing

Books with no modern edition

Much of what is being recovered has not been in print for a century. Talk to us about the list.

Press

What bulk scanning finds

The story of which books are being scanned, and what happens to them afterwards.

For labs

For organisations acquiring and scanning print at scale

We ask for permission, not payment: let the public domain scans be published for human readers.

Not rights, not exclusivity, not your corpus. One clause, agreed once, applied to material you hold no claim over.

What you get

  • The enriched versions of those public domain scans, back as part of the exchange
  • No cost to you for the publishing side
  • First-mover credit on the public domain commitment

Processing is carried out by MonkAI.

Get in touch

Tell us which books you hold, and we will tell you where they could go.

Libraries, publishers, press and organisations scanning print all start with the same short conversation.