Free fairy tales to read online for kids: where it's legal

In the UK, copyright generally lasts 70 years after the author's death; in the United States the rules depend mainly on when a work was published, and books from around a century ago are now free. The Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen died in the 19th century, so their tales have been free for well over a hundred years. Beatrix Potter died in December 1943, so in the UK her little books — including The Tale of Peter Rabbit — have been free since 2014. That is why the classics are legally free, while living authors and their publishers understandably keep their rights.

This gives a simple rule of thumb: if the author died more than 70 years ago, the text may be shared freely online. If a site offers a "free download" of a book you can also see on bookshop shelves, it is almost certainly a pirated copy — the text can vanish at any time, and the author, whose next stories might never get written, earns nothing from it.

Which stories suit which age is covered in detail in our article Fairy tales for kids to read: where to get them free and how to choose by age — here we focus on where the texts legally live and how to get them onto your screen.

Alongside libraries and archives there are plenty of "free fairy tales" sites that work differently: they only show the text after you register, wrap it in pop-up ads, or openly offer PDFs of current books. Three questions to ask before opening such a site with your child:

Does it want your e-mail or an account for a text that is free? Public-domain works need no registration — you will find the same text on Wikisource without it. The sign-up is not there for you, but to collect addresses.

Does it offer for free a book that is currently on sale? Neither the author nor the publisher allowed that. The giveaway is usually "download the whole book as a PDF" next to titles from current bookshop lists.

Does the site say where the text comes from? Reputable sources name the author and the origin — the edition they transcribed or the licence. A site where the stories "just are" has most likely scraped them from around the internet, including errors and arbitrary edits that are not in the original.

Ad-heavy pages are a chapter of their own: even if the text is legal, reading with a child between banners and pop-ups is not worth it when the same story exists in a clean version on Project Gutenberg.

Reading from a screen is great for parents who read aloud: you have your phone in the waiting room, on the train or on holiday, where there is no bookshelf. For the bedtime routine, though, a glowing screen is less suitable — what to replace it with in the evening and how to build the routine is covered in our article Bedtime stories: texts, audio and a routine that ends in sleep.

When your child does not feel like reading or listening to you, the spoken word helps: CBeebies Radio on BBC Sounds and Storynory offer stories to listen to for free. We write about video and its limits in Read-aloud stories for kids on YouTube: when video is enough and when it isn't.

And if you are looking for a story starring your own child, neither the classics nor the radio can help — Hero of the Book makes a personalised e-book with your child in the leading role: it reads online just like the e-books above, is usually ready within 15 minutes, costs $7.99, and a narrated audio version can be added for $3.99.