Books to try
Illustrated books, out of copyright and free to
work from. The pictures come in with the words — each one filed under the sentence it
sits beneath, which is what lets the tool propose who and where is in it.
Start in one press
Nothing to download. Free, nothing to name, about
half a minute — the same door as your own book, with the manuscript already in it.
The Tale of Peter Rabbit
Beatrix Potter · 1902
The smallest complete picture book there is: a plate for nearly every page, and a story short enough that the whole thing runs in one sitting. Start here.
The Velveteen Rabbit
Margery Williams Bianco · 1922
The opposite shape — four times the words and a ninth of the pictures, so the scenes have to come out of prose rather than off the plates.
The rest
Download one and bring it back through
the ordinary door — StoryBarn reads
.epub, and the pictures come with it.
L. Leslie Brooke · 1903
Almost entirely picture: 47 plates and 315 words. What the tool does when the illustrations are carrying the story and the text barely is.
Beatrix Potter · 1909
Potter again, and the book that taught the reader about linked thumbnails: its plates sit at 1172×1591 behind 295×400 previews, and reading it naively gives you 62 illustrations for a book with 31.
Beatrix Potter · 1905
Two cats and a misunderstanding about a pie — more back-and-forth than the other Potters, so there is real dialogue to cast.
Florence White Williams · 1918
A folk tale everybody already knows, which makes a draft easy to judge: you can tell at a glance whether the scenes came out right.
Wanda Gág · 1928
The newest thing here — it entered the public domain in 2024 — and the biggest artwork, at 2560px on the shorter side.
L. Leslie Brooke · 1905
Four tales in one volume: the first book here that is a COLLECTION rather than one story, so the scene list has to decide where an episode ends.
M. Bradley · 1873
189 plates, the most of anything here, and the stress test for the illustration path — reading it files more pictures than most productions ever shoot.
Unknown · 1875
Twelve thousand words and 120 illustrations: large enough that the material genuinely needs more than one episode, which is the arithmetic nothing else here exercises.
Anonymous · 1766
A facsimile with a scholar's introduction in front of it — 22,000 words of which the story is a fraction. Good for seeing what a read does with front matter nobody warned it about.
Why these are free to use
Public domain, from Project Gutenberg. Their licence allows a book to be passed on with its notice attached, or used freely with every reference to Project Gutenberg removed — which is what StoryBarn does when it reads one, because the notice is three quarters of the file.
Copyright and trademark are different things. These texts and illustrations are out of copyright and free to work from; some of the NAMES are still live trademarks — Peter Rabbit is Frederick Warne's — which does not matter for trying the tool and does matter the day you publish something commercial under one.
Every one of these was published before 1930, so
it is public domain in the United States at 95 years; their authors died between 1940
and 1946, which clears them under life-plus-70 in the UK and the EU as well. What you
make from one is yours.