What Belongs in BookCove
People sometimes ask what BookCove is trying to be, and the easiest way to answer is by pointing at what it isn't. Project Gutenberg takes essentially everything that can be cleared and transcribed, which is a genuine public service and not what we are doing at BookCove. Standard Ebooks goes the other direction and produces beautiful editions of the recognized classics, which is also a public service and also not what we are doing, either. BookCove sits in the gap between them.
The one rule
A story belongs here if it meets the collection guidelines in the next section and is still genuinely entertaining to read today. That's the whole test. Not important, not representative, not historically instructive—entertaining. If it grabs you in the first page and keeps moving, it's a candidate. If reading it feels like homework, it isn't, no matter whose name is on it.
That sounds loose, and it is. It's a judgment call rather than a checklist, and we make it by reading the thing. But it's an honest description of how the collection actually gets built, and it explains most of what you'll find here and most of what you won't.
What that looks like in practice
The material starts around 1915 and runs forward as far as the public domain allows. It's mostly magazine fiction—pulp and slick both—along with novellas and the occasional novel when it belongs to an author already well represented in the collection. Westerns dominate, but that's a consequence of the rule rather than the rule itself. Adventure is well represented. Detective fiction shows up when it earns its place. Science fiction isn't planned.
Setting matters more here than it does at most sites. Stories are almost always set in the United States or Canada, and we count the northern country generously: Yukon tales and RCMP stories are as welcome as anything out of Arizona. We turned down a South Sea treasure hunt recently, and that's typical of what gets declined. Tropical adventure isn't off the table forever, but it needs a real reason. Most of the suggestions that we decline are simply too far removed from something that happened in North America or they cannot be confirmed to be in the public domain (currently pre-1930). Given those constraints, there still are a lot of really good stories out there. Suggestions are welcome, and the best ones come with a reason—not "this author is in the public domain" but "this story is a good read, and here's why."
Depth over breadth
When an author clears the bar, We would rather go deep than sample. W. C. Tuttle has more than a hundred stories on the site, and that's deliberate. A reader who finds one Tuttle story they like should be able to spend a month here without running out. That's a different shape of collection than one broad title per author, and we think it's more useful to the kind of reader BookCove is for.
Some things BookCove is not
BookCove isn't an archive. Plenty of scannable material stays out, and that's the point of having a policy at all. It isn't a canon either—we are not curating great literature and I don't rank what's on BookCove against that. BookCove isn't scholarly: no critical apparatus, no variant texts, no textual notes beyond what a reader needs. And it isn't modern. Material is included in good faith when it is believed to be in the public domain in the United States
Practicality also gets a vote. A story can pass the entertainment test and still not make it if the surviving source is too poor to produce a clean text, or if the copy that reaches us is too fragmentary to finish honestly. When something does go in, the aim is to do more than repost it. BookCove provides a readable web edition, downloadable files, a cover when one exists or can be made, and enough context that the item doesn't feel anonymous.