Here’s A Different Twist on Public Domain Publishing

Perhaps you’ve heard of public domain publishing as a pathway to earning money online.  I am here to tell you about a twist on it that can have you bringing in extra revenue almost right away.

First, though, let’s review the fundamentals. As you may know, many books and other materials have entered the public domain (fallen out of copyright protection) and may be republished, in any form, by any person who goes to the trouble to do so. In the United States most works published through 1923 are now considered to be public domain (”PD”).

If you discover a PD book that you believe someone would purchase if it were republished, you could reprint it as a physical book and sell copies through eBay, Amazon or your own web site. Some enterprising individuals have done this with old correspondence courses and other non-fiction, how-to type materials from decades past.

On the other hand, you could repackage your PD discovery as an e-book and make it available for downloading, for a price. This is probably the more usual way that people are earning money at this time from the public domain.Again, how-to, self-improvement and other non-fiction works will usually prove to be the most profitable.

Now about that twist I mentioned.  The method I prefer is to make PD books freely available on the web, and place advertising on their pages. Strictly speaking, then, you are selling ad space, not the book itself.

A few years a guy named Steve Smith heard about an odd book from 1892 that combined a time-travel-type tale with a novel about golf. Its title was Golf In the Year 2000.

Afer a bit of searching, he was able to find a copy of this book for just $10. He scanned the pages, converted them with opitcal character reading software, and posted the whole book on a website he had registered just for this purpose.

He went further than that, though. On his site’s pages, he surrounded the text of the book with Google AdSense and affiliate merchant ads. This allowed him to make money from visitors clicking the AdSense or buying things. By the way, if you’re interested you can view his site at www.golf-in-the-year-2000.com.

Steve’s online edition of Golf In the Year 2000 attracts a steady stream of golf enthusiasts, science fiction fans, Victorian literature lovers and the simply curious, he says. And the ads on his pages bring him money!

It’s a concept that many others could copy, of course. Public-domain sources are abundant nowadays.  You might be able to find an appropriate book in one of the many web-based PD repositories, preferably one that not many other people have discovered yet.

The good thing with this idea is that the book you showcase (and use to earn ad revenue) need not be restricted to non-fiction or how-to.As with Mr. Smith’s strange little science fictional golf gem, it can simply be something that will bring web surfers to your site, for the novelty if nothing else.

You could also look in used-book stores to try to find something rare enough not to have made it to the Internet at all.  In that case you will probably need to buy a scanner and some OCR software to get the text into your computer.

Public domain publishing is truly a potentially lucrative area.Further, how you “repurpose” your public domain finds is completely up to you.  That’s what makes it so fun, as well as profitable.

This method of publishing public domain material is also described in this article, along with suggestions for further reading.

If you are interested in selling actual used books online, as on Amazon or eBay, there’s a downloadable report available that shows a new and mega-profitable way to do it.  Check it out here or read a solid review of it at Can You Still Make Money Selling Used Books on Amazon?