Public Domain

1347 Views 15 Replies 12 Participants Last post by QuantumIguana, Jan 24, 2013

50733

Discussion Starter · Jan 24, 2013

:-X

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Mathew Reuther

· #2 · Jan 24, 2013

Public domain means public domain. There's no restrictions on publishing works in the public domain in whole or in part. There doesn't have to be fair use or anything.

Many public domain works are available for 99c or free, however, so finding unpublished public domain works to make money on (obviously more popular works will sell more) is not exactly easy.

JeanneM

· #3 · Jan 24, 2013

If you publish public domain works and add substantially to them, i.e. your own translation, forwards, annotated comments, you can copyright your version of it. Only the original material is public domain. Aubrey Beardsley, who illustrated some of Poe's works, is also in the public domain. You can often see his artwork on Zazzle and other print on demand companies.

I don't know if it is the same for literature, but artwork published before 1923 is in the public domain in the US. That is why even though Maxfield Parrish has not been deceased for 70 years yet, his pre-1923 works are PD.

Mathew Reuther

· #4 · Jan 24, 2013

DDark said:
Edgar Allen Poe and Shakespeare would be easy. You could just publish romeo and juliet with a hot cover (like "Easy") lol. I could sell the crap out of Poe, but it just seems wrong.

If you can do it, do it. I don't have your faith, perhaps.

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&field-keywords=poe

107 pages of Poe.

Zelah Meyer

· #5 · Jan 24, 2013

It's worth noting that, just because something is public domain in the US, it doesn't mean that it's public domain everywhere else that it would be sold if you published via Kindle using the worldwide option. Also, for artwork - the US considers photographs of public domain paintings to be public domain, other countries grant copyright to the photographer - so worth checking if you want to publish outside the US.

Some links from my hundreds of bookmarks on writing!:

http://www.publicdomaintreasurehunter.com/2010/07/25/republishing-u-s-public-domain-works-in-the-u-k/ (also read the comments regarding the situation with Germany)

http://www.reusableart.com/v/about/

I have a vague recollection of reading something that suggested that Amazon doesn't like people uploading public domain works that are already on there unless they offer something different to the material already uploaded. I couldn't swear to it - but it's nagging away in the back of my head. If you consider publishing public domain work then it's worth checking the situation with that before you go to any effort to prepare it for publication.

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Lisa Grace

· #6 · Jan 24, 2013

Dave Ramsey does this and has been for a while. He takes out of print, past copyright, old motivational speakers, adds a forward, and publishes it.

I have a friend who is adding helpful searchword TOC's on past copyrighted Bibles and re-releasing them.

Sure, you can be a publisher.

Routhwick

· #7 · Jan 24, 2013

JeanneM said:
I don't know if it is the same for literature, but artwork published before 1923 is in the public domain in the US. That is why even though Maxfield Parrish has not been deceased for 70 years yet, his pre-1923 works are PD.

Yes, written works also qualify. Check the Internet Archive, Wikisource, or Project Gutenberg.

George Berger

· #8 · Jan 24, 2013

Zelah Meyer said:
I have a vague recollection of reading something that suggested that Amazon doesn't like people uploading public domain works that are already on there unless they offer something different to the material already uploaded. I couldn't swear to it - but it's nagging away in the back of my head. If you consider publishing public domain work then it's worth checking the situation with that before you go to any effort to prepare it for publication.

It's true, but I'm not sure how well-enforced it is.

This is a fairly famous romance novel from 1912, long in the public domain, at least in the U.S. There are two Kindle versions; one free, one 99c. Both pretty obviously originate from the same Project Gutenberg original. The 99c one has some pretty dubious extra cruft added in an effort to make it "unique", while not much has been done to the free one except to remove the PG note from the beginning.

Somewhat to my amusement, they're both categorized quite differently.

Routhwick

· #9 · Jan 24, 2013

Speaking of public-domain works, I'm only starting to peddle my wares within this trade. Did you know that Ernest Vincent Wright's Gadsby (which I've re-issued) has no U.S. copyright due to renewal failure by 1967? That's part of what sold me when it came to publishing it.

I'm also working on a scan of James Barnes' From Then Till Now, which fell into the same category a few years prior (in 1962).

jvin248

· #10 · Jan 24, 2013

.
That market it quite saturated. This link shows 22,000 books in it and many from 2010 so they've accumulated a lot of downloads and high ranking.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_st?keywords=Public+Domain+Books&qid=1359036069&rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3APublic+Domain+Books&sort=popularity-rank
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By publisher: Public Domain Books
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Is that Amazon? Authors are listed as original author but who is behind those titles?
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For a while some of those books like "famous book title - and Zombies" or other mythic creatures were popular, but even that is even slowing down.
.
.

G

· #11 · Jan 24, 2013

Amazon frowns on PD books that don't bring anything new to the table. And they will deactivate PD titles that they feel just crowd the marketplace. Generally, they want you to add something new to the mix. I have a couple of PD titles, but I had to give Amazon a reason for publishing them. Lives of Necromancers is illustrated with period specific woodcuts and drawings to accent the book. The print version has a full index. Folklore and Fairy Tales of the East is a collection of folklore taken from various eastern cultures, including Japan, China, and Persia. Both are actually used in some schools (Lives because the index is highly useful to college students and Folklore because it is a good primer to introduce students to eastern folklore. But in both cases, they weren't just files lifted from another PD site. I put effort into them.

If you have a unique understanding of the source material or can bring something new to the mix, I'm a fan of PD products. But just rehashing what is already available somewhere like Project Gutenberg? Eh...

BTW: can you market Romeo and *****t as a romance? I mean, there isn't a HEA there at ALLLLLLLLL. ::)

::)

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Becca Mills

· #12 · Jan 24, 2013

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:
BTW: can you market Romeo and Juliet as a romance? I mean, there isn't a HEA there at ALLLLLLLLL.

Depends on how annoying you find them.

tensen

· #13 · Jan 24, 2013

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:
BTW: can you market Romeo and Juliet as a romance? I mean, there isn't a HEA there at ALLLLLLLLL.

I think it needs to be reprinted with a title like: "Romeo Dies In The End."

George Berger

· #14 · Jan 24, 2013

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:
BTW: can you market Romeo and Juliet as a romance? I mean, there isn't a HEA there at ALLLLLLLLL.

Hey, it's public domain, you can do anything you want with it...

...including doing a search-and-replace to change Juliet to Julio, to capitalize on that lucrative M/M romance market.

Betsy the Quilter

· #15 · Jan 24, 2013

Bards and Sages (Julie) said:
BTW: can you market Romeo and Juliet as a romance? I mean, there isn't a HEA there at ALLLLLLLLL.

Becca Mills said:
Depends on how annoying you find them.

*wipes coffee off iPad*

Betsy

QuantumIguana

· #16 · Jan 24, 2013

It's all about added value. Add in artwork, an interactive table of contents, etc., and you moght have something people wanted to pay for. I spent 94 cents for the complete collection of Baum's Oz books. I could have downloaded them individually, but it was worth 94 cents to have them in one file. Or consider commentary. I read Dante's Inferno, and I would have understood far less of it if there weren't footnotes explaining the text to me. Those footnotes aren't public domain.

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