Those in Peril – Wilbur Smith

Public Domain Material Part Four

Documents

It is fairly incomprehensible the amount of formerly copyrighted material that is available for general usage and while we touched on a few with the audio books earlier, there are many others that haven’t been reformatted to some sort of audio.

These are easier to work with, as you can arrange these in categories much the same way you could with the audio books – but there is so much more freedom. While you could have maybe half of the works of Louisa May Alcott available in an audio format, it is possible for you to have her entire collected works available.

Manually

Here’s the trick: even if you don’t and can’t find it on the internet, there is nothing stopping you from taking the recently published material and typing it all out. As long as the work is in the public domain, it doesn’t matter if it’s been published recently, it’s still public domain and you can use it.

Documents are a little bit tricky, though, because you could spend your time making a TXT file for your package and someone can just come along and copy that text file into one of their packages for their profit.

To combat that problem, all you have to do is create a non-editable file that will display your document, such as a PDF. When you create the file, make sure you brand it by putting a title at the top with the original author’s name and a link to your website at the bottom, with maybe even your name or a company name.

Partially Automated

If typing out pages and pages of content seems rather time consuming to you, then you’re not alone. It is absolutely time consuming and can be tedious. Unless you’re just an ultra-fast typist with all the time in the world, you’re going to want a faster way to do it.

The best way to do this is with a scanner that has an automated document feeder attached. It’s a thing at the top of a scanner that will feed sheets through automatically and even flip them over for you in the process so it’ll copy both sides. After you do this, you’ll have tons of images of the book on your computer.

Having images doesn’t really help, though, because you’re pretty much at the same point as just having a physical book to copy from. This isn’t entirely true, though, as you are in a very advantageous position now. You can let your computer do the rest of the work while you sit back and wait for it to process.

Some scanners come with this particular software, others don’t, but you need an optical character recognizer.

It is a program on your computer that you can use to interpret images (in particular, images from your scanner) as words. Then you can take literally whole books, rip them apart, place them in the feeder, start the scan, and then let the OCR process the entire book.

If you have set it up correctly, you’ll be able to just walk away while all of this is happening and go do something else. After it’s done, you can the documents it has made, combine them into one if you need to, and then open the new document into a program that will automatically check for spelling and grammar errors.

A program that would do that would be Microsoft Office, but that costs a lot of money. A good substitute for that if you don’t have the resources would be Open Office. After you import your document, you can then edit it, export them as a PDF to protect them, and then make them a part of your packages.

Open Office doesn’t natively support PDF export; you’ll have to find a plugin for it on their website.

Simple OCR: www.simpleocr.com

Open Office (MS Office Clone): www.openoffice.org
Other Ideas

There are other ways to make money with the public domain content and one very good way is to make a membership site by offering collected instructional works to members who want some very good information.

You may have to update some of the information but for the most part if you’re working with fundamental concepts, then information would still be useful today.

Just outright selling your packages is good if you want to do it on eBay. You can literally sell just about anything on eBay as long as you have the right to sell it and if it is a physical product.

If you wanted to offer a physical book to people, then you could always approach LuLu.com as a way to self-publish. They offer a way for you to do what is called “Publish on Demand”, so that you can publish books one at a time and pay one at a time so you’re not bogged down with a lot of extra stock.

Also, with the “Publish on Demand” setup, Amazon offers a similar service and is ideal for people who have eReaders (digital downloads) as well as people who want a physical book.

Public Domain Swipe File

Here is a page out of my personal swipe file of some of the hottest titles available within the Public Domain:

Too big for this email me for the ebook download address

These are titles that are still very relevant in today’s society, and are ‘easy sellers’ in terms of being some of the highest quality writers found within the public domain.

To locate additional public domain titles in your market, use websites such as www.Alibris.com to enter in keyword phrases and search for books in the public domain from 1963 and before (remembering that certain material from 1926 to 1963 may have updated their copyright, so always verify that first by checking the copyright date).

You can do this by visiting the copyright database at http://www.copyright.gov/records/cohm.html

If a copyright has been renewed, you will see a “RE” in the registration number such as:

Book Title: How To Turn Your Ability Into Cash
RE000111456 / 1981-12-23

Public Domain Resources

Public Domain Repositories

Library of Congress

http://www.loc.gov.library/libarch-digital.html

University of Pennsylvania

http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books

Project Gutenberg

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

Digital Library

http://www.digital-library.upenn.edu/books

Government Resources (for public domain from the Federal database)

http://www.Firstgov.gov

http://www.access.gpo.gov

http://www.library.okstate.edu/govdocs/browsetopics

http://www.gpoaccess.gov/cgp/index.html

Public Domain Book Databases

Ibiblio

http://www.ibilio.org

Abe Books

http://www.AbeBooks.com

Alibris

http://www.Alibris.com

Audio Books – Public Domain

http://www.Librivox.org

Public Domain Images

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_image_resources

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_page

http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/

Public Domain Music

http://www.ibiblio.org/mutopia/

http://www.pdinfo.com/list/g.htm

http://www.sheetmusicusa.com

Public Domain Film

http://www.Nara.gov

http://www.BuyOutFootage.com

Public Domain Works

http://www.store.doverpublications.com

Copyright Information:

http://copyright.gov/

Search Copyright:

http://www.Copyright.gov/records/cohm.html

Creative Commons

http://www.CreativeCommons.org

And there it is. Almost the whole thing. Remember if you would like the complete book just email me for the download address.

Philip
http://philipjubb.com
http://internationalarticledirectory.com/
http://certainscripts.com

A Fun Fact...


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