Reprinting Public Domain Texts as eBooks

There is a wealth of material, free for the taking, that can be legally copied and published. Under copyright law this material is referred to as 'public domain.' The author's, in most cases, are long since dead. Project Gutenberg, for example, has published over 6,000 public domain eBooks in plain text format. That is a volunteer program that gives away eBooks for free, but there is no reason a similar model won't work for paid sales. In fact, many Project Gutenburg texts are also sold as eBooks, usually in formats other than plain text. So long as the price is kept very low, this is a fair transaction -- the buyer is paying for the producers time in formatting the text and converting it into a format that users find easier to access than plain text. For the most part, only the most popular texts have been converted to other formats, so there is much material available there for conversion. Adding illustrations (often scanned from the original public domain book), adding chapter links, and correcting typographical errors further enhances the value of some of these works.

An even better source for those who wish to reprint public domain works are the original books that have not yet been converted to electronic texts. Under U.S. copyright law, there are literally millions of books in the public domain. Almost everything published before 1925 is fair game. Current copyright law extends coverage for the life of the author plus 75 years, a ridiculously long period that benefits corporations but harms the public good by hampering the availability of works deemed 'unimportant' by the big publishers because they have too small an audience. Luckily however, the law did not encompass works already in the public domain under earlier, more rational laws.

Another source of public domain works in the U.S. is Government publications. Works by government employees created in the course of their work, are exempted from copyright protection. In recent years, many government works have born copyright claims, and in some instances authors and publishers are claiming they qualify for copyright for one reason or another, so you have to be careful when selecting such works, but there is a mountain of new publications churned out by government workers each year, and a few of them are worth reprinting.

Another approach well worth pursuing is reprinting works that are still protected under copyright, with the permission of the copyright holder. If you or your relative, friend or acquaintance, have a published book that is now out-of-print, there is a good chance you can make an eBook out of it, with the author's permission. Be sure to check the contract with the publisher, to be sure they can't claim electronic reprint rights. If you are submitting a book for print publication, be sure electronic reprint rights are specifically covered in the contract! Most older contracts don't mention such rights, so it can be a gray area determining who owns those rights. If you get reprint rights for a publication from the author, be sure you have EXCLUSIVE rights to the electronic format reprints if you want to include the publication here, we do not accept ebooks to which you hold non-exclusive reprint rights.

When selecting a public domain text for reproduction as an eBook, you need to consider what titles and subjects will be in demand. Who wants to read an old book? Well, if it was well written, it will still be a good read, as evidenced by the classics. But there are many excellent old books that never reached 'classic' status, and so have been ignored by reprint publishers. Historians and genealogists are also interested in old texts, more for their content than their style. So even poorly written local history books will always be in demand, at least in that locality they cover. Family genealogies, likewise, are a source of tremendous information for those doing research.

When you have located a text that you believe is a good candidate for reprinting, do a little on-line research. Use an on-line search engine like GOOGLE to see if the book is widely available. See how much copies sell for, and if reprints are available. The best situation is when the book was popular enough to have been reprinted several times, but even the most recent reprint is now out-of-print. Also good are books valued for content (rather than binding, signatures, or other features of the physical book) that have never been reprinted, but whose originals command large prices. See our article on Choosing and Researching a Topic for an eBook, as many of the principals are the same if you are selecting a topic to reprint.

There are several options for acquiring the text from which to make a reprint. You can borrow a copy from a library. If the book is not available on loan, you may be able to photocopy the entire book at the library -- University Libraries are often conveniently set-up for this. Or you can purchase the book, and sell it again when you have finished with it.

Converting the book to electronic text is the most tedious part of the process. Typing the entire text is not difficult if you are a fast typist. If the typesetting in the book is not too antique, you can use OCR (optical character recognition) software to convert the text. Be sure to proofread and correct OCR texts very carefully -- OCR is far from perfect.

Whichever method you use to create the text, import it into a word processing program (MS-Word is the most widely supported) and try to reproduce the heading, italics, and other typographical features of the original work. In most cases it is not necessary to reproduce page numbers, or running headers/footers -- these features can make it more difficult to convert the etext into various eBook formats.

If the original book has footnotes, you will generally want to include those, but since the pagination will change, you can't include them as footnotes. Depending on their relevance, you can include them in an appendix, or set them into the text(1), using some means of setting them off from the regular text and labeling them as footnotes.

{Footnote: (1) This is one way to handle footnotes. You can convert *, +, and other marks into numbers if there are numerous footnotes, or retain them if that is more convenient.}

Remember, you are the publisher -- feel free to make minor changes of formatting or markup on the text, but make sure the content is faithfully and accurately reproduced. Your reader will appreciate it, and that appreciation often translates into further sales.

If you specialize in a particular genre of reprints you will learn a great deal about that genre in the process. That will improve your ability to convert further texts, and give you a venue for further products if you want -- as an expert you can write your own eBook about the value of your particular niche genre.