Public domain icons: book, headphones

As I write, I’m waiting for various deities to review and approve the Unstable Orbits audiobook for sale. It’ll appear “in the next ten days” on Amazon, Audible and Apple Books (in the Audiobooks section), assuming all goes well.

I’ve been putting together some promotional graphics to spray across socials once the release is official. As part of these I wanted to include some simple icons to represent the eye-related (paperback, ebook) and ear-related (audiobook) formats. There are, you’ll be shocked to learn, an infinite number of free* icons on the internet, where the asterisk is significant and often means “(not really)” or “(terms and conditions apply)”. You can (and I did) spend a long time looking for simple, consistent, legible-while-small single-colour icons for “book” and “headphones” that are free, as opposed to free*.

I have nothing against free* icons: if people want credit for their icon, or want your email address in exchange for the icon, then fine. If they want payment for certain versions or formats of the icon, then fine. That’s their choice.

And for some graphics, like the ones I’ve been creating, I don’t want to pay and I don’t want to have to give credit. That’s my choice.

I’m not going to blatantly steal any icons, as that’s wrong. So I decided to make my own.

This isn’t totally unusual for me. I’ve been creating graphics – including icons – in various jobs for a disturbingly large number of years. I’m not a graphic designer and I don’t pretend to be artistic, but I can do a decent job within limits. I grew up making 8×8 pixel fonts and graphics for the ZX Spectrum and friends. Graphics and icons I’ve created have shipped in actual software. It’s all just dots, you know. This kind of work exercises a different part of my brain. It’s another form of creativity, and it’s a great distraction from the rest of the day.

I suspect many other authors would also benefit from simple icons for “book” and “headphones” and I have no wish to faff around with licensing or payments or anything like that for these simple images, so I’m making them public domain. I also created a “new audiobook” icon incoporating the headphones, and that’s PD too.

For convenience I’m making the icons available as SVGs and PNGs. There are black/white variants of the two core icons, and colour/mono variants of the “new audiobook” icon. If you want to recolour any of these beyond what you see here, use the SVG and a vector tool that knows how to mangle them.

Download

The icons in this section and only these icons are released as public domain. I retain full copyright on my books and any other creations.

These icons are dedicated to the public domain under the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. You may copy, modify, distribute and use them, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.

Here’s an image of the icons. Don’t click the image. To get the icon files, download this zip file (via Google Drive).

Usage

Here’s a sneak peek of one of the promo images I’ve created, part of a carousel that I’ll publish on Tiktok and Instagram when the audiobook is available: