Poddium Public Domain Project
About
this project.
The story behind Librery, and what we are trying to build.
How this started
Poddium has always been about one question: how do we make literature, in all its forms, easier to find and easier to love. Most of that work has been about new writing, new writers, and new ways to publish. But somewhere along the way, we kept running into the same problem from the other direction.
Some of the most important works in Indonesian literature were sitting in plain sight, legally free for anyone to use, and almost nobody could actually find them in a readable, modern format. Chairil Anwar's poetry had been in the public domain for years. Try searching for a clean, properly formatted digital edition. You will mostly find scanned PDFs, broken links, and forum posts from a decade ago.
That gap between "technically free" and "actually accessible" is where this project began.
What we are trying to do
Librery exists to close that gap. The work happens in three stages.
We identify works that have entered the public domain, verify their status carefully, and build a catalogue that other people do not have to research from scratch.
A public domain text is not automatically a good reading experience. We reformat these works into clean, modern editions that respect the original while being genuinely pleasant to read on a screen.
Everything we publish stays free. No paywalls, no account walls, no hidden conditions. If a work belongs to the public, it should actually reach the public.
Who is behind this
Librery is a project of Poddium Foundation (Yayasan Poddium Literasi Berdikari), the nonprofit arm of Poddium, separate from Poddium's commercial publishing platform. This separation matters to us. Preservation and access work should not have to justify itself commercially to exist.
On the state of public domain literature in Indonesia
According to data from Indonesia's Directorate General of Intellectual Property (DJKI), thousands of works have already entered the public domain in Indonesia, ranging from classical literature to traditional music recordings. On paper, the legal foundation is solid. Indonesia's Copyright Law (UU No. 28 Tahun 2014) sets clear terms, and once those terms expire, a work belongs to everyone.
But a law granting access is not the same thing as access actually existing. Most of these works live in scattered scans, fragile microfilm, or institutional archives that were never built with a general reader in mind. Even something as canonical as Chairil Anwar's poetry, arguably the most recognizable name in modern Indonesian literature, is genuinely difficult to find in a clean, properly formatted digital edition. You will find broken links, low-resolution scans, and forum uploads from a decade ago long before you find anything resembling a readable book.
This is not a uniquely Indonesian problem. Confusion around what public domain even means is widespread, partly because the term gets used loosely online. Plenty of people assume that anything freely available on the internet must be public domain, when in fact that status depends on specific legal conditions tied to authorship and time. The gap is not just technical. It is also a gap in public understanding.
What is missing is not the legal status. It is the infrastructure. Someone has to actually do the unglamorous work of locating these works, verifying their status, formatting them properly, and putting them somewhere people can find. That gap, between what the law already allows and what readers can actually hold in their hands, is the specific problem Librery was built to address.
Where this is going
This is an early chapter, not a finished archive. A few things we are working toward:
- Expanding the catalogue well beyond our current titles, with a focus on Indonesian literary heritage that has fallen out of print or out of memory
- Building out the Librery Lexicon into a genuinely useful reference for understanding copyright and public domain concepts in plain language
- Exploring how Librery connects with Poddium's other tools, so that public domain works can feed into new creative and educational work rather than sitting still in an archive
- Feeding this same corpus into LITA (Literatur Interaktif Terbuka Adaptif / Literature Interactive Teaching Assistant), a literary AI companion we are building. The goal is not to turn literature into something studied through rigid theoretical boxes, but to give readers a conversational partner, something closer to a chatbot you can actually talk to about the books you love. LITA learns from the past to help shape what readers discover next.
None of this moves quickly without support. If this project matters to you, the most direct way to help is by supporting the foundation directly, or simply by reading, sharing, and telling someone else this archive exists.