THREE Amazing Ways to Make Money from the Public Domain

The Public Domain can be used to create works for countless media categories and category combinations, and sold singly as printed books, magazines, photographs, audio recordings, software, eBooks, films, audio tapes, video recordings, sheet music.  Products can also be sold in combinations, such as printed book with CD, eBook with membership site, and more.

Let us look at just a few ways to turn Public Domain creative works into physical and digital products. 

While reading this article please take time to seek ways to be individual, better still unique, and turn an item literally anyone can claim from the public domain into your own exclusive products, available only from you!

Let’s go with a few ideas:

*  Reprint text and illustrations ‘as is’, in print format, without making any changes.  The simplest way to do this is to obtain a physical version of an original document, say a report or book, and to scan or photocopy the information from which to create subsequent copies.

Note that, although this is the fastest and easiest way to recreate and sell public domain works, it really doesn’t take much effort to make a few simple changes to text or layout, or illustrations and pagination, for example.  These few changes take very little time but they are highly significant in determining your rights in the book.  This is because with a few changes, enough to make the item recognisably different from the public domain original, the new work becomes what’s known as a ‘derivative’ work and its creator is fully protected under copyright law.  This means, if anyone copies your version of the product, they can be sued for damages.

Note that, if you take a book from the public domain and recreate it as individual shorter reports, without making changes to the text, your product is again a derivative and becomes your sole copyright.

*  Reprint the text and illustrations ‘as is’ and convert to downloadable format.  This involves laying out the pages as they were in the original format, by scanning, for example, or by rekeying an exact copy of the document.  Subsequently you turn the document into pdf or other eBook format.  Arguably, this change from print to digital copy is sufficient to make your product a copyright protected derivative work.  But in reality it would be impossible to know if someone selling an identical digital item to yours has copied your work or created their own product from scratch just as you did.  So at least make a few changes, design your own front cover, for example, or use a different font, add a few illustrations, create a contents sheet or index section where none existed before.

Note that some of the biggest public domain resource sites provide public domain works as ready to download text.  So all  you have to do is go to your preferred location – Gutenberg is most people’s favourite – you’re your title, download and add the text to a newly opened ‘Word’ document, choose your own font and size, repaginate the text so that all chapters begin on a new page, and so on.  ‘Word’ can be changed into pdf format literally at a keystroke using several free and low cost software programs on the market today.  Find them by searching google.com for ‘pdf + creator + free’ or similar.

* Recreate the text ‘as is’, in ‘Word’, PDF or similar fashion, and burn your eBooks on CD.  This makes it easier for potential buyers who want your books but are unfamiliar with downloading or have a slow connection or who simply prefer physical media.  It’s always a good idea to provide as many product formats as possible and optimise your market potential.  You’ll also find that, certainly on eBay, buyers think they know how to download digital products, but later find they can’t, so they take out their temper on you and you receive negative feedback.  Sellers of downloadable products can avoid this common scenario by informing buyers that a CD will follow shortly after they access their download links.