Two Little Known Ways to Create Your Own Unique Products from the Public Domain

The Internet is a huge place, packed with marketers, you have to be different, preferably unique, to grab your share of easy profits online.  Here are a few ideas to help you turn public domain items into unique products for your business:

*  Combine old with new and create a truly unique book bearing little or no comparison to its public domain origins.  You can do this by taking the original public domain text and flow it into a ‘Word’ document.  Colour the public domain text in red (or another colour that reveals this text as public domain), then using blue or another colour begin adding your own comments and research materials.  This latter writing must be unique or from another public domain source, you must not copy or plagiarise another person’s work and you must never consider your misdeed will be undetected.  Red text can be left ‘as is’, you can’t break copyright or plagiarise public domain work.  The blue text is your priority, you need to make this different, to continue working and reworking the words, to move as far away as possible from the original text.  Do not under-estimate the task of making big differences to anything you rewrite (paraphrase) from work that isn’t in the public domain.  

This is because, on the Internet just a few words into a major search engine, like Google, will highlight many sources of the exact wording you have just stolen from someone else’s work and eventually your crime will be discovered.  So always research and paraphrase other people’s work.   Paraphrase means to study, understand and rewrite the earlier work using your own words and writing style.  But be careful about paraphrasing which is legal, in moderation and, in excess is tantamount to copyright theft.  Having added all the additional information you require to your basic public domain text you should copyright your work (e.g. Copyright Avril Harper 2007) and pat yourself on the back because this new work is your own exclusive copyright and very different to anything someone else creates from the same original public domain source.  When you learn the art of paraphrasing more recent research material, take time to paraphrase the public domain element of your book, that way you’ll create something truly unique. 

*  Update a product from the public domain or adapt it to suit another market.  You could translate the book into another language, for example, or reprint it in a large font to benefit readers with restricted eye sight.  Or you could update the product, add to it, or paraphrase the entire text to make it more appealing to younger or older readers.  You could use the old product as a base from which to grow your own book, in which case you might paraphrase pages, line by line, turning the original author’s words and terminology into your own unique way of communicating.  Many very early texts, from the mid 1800s and earlier, contain excellent content, but are difficult to read because of archaic language and strange spellings of earlier times.  So there’s plenty of scope to rewrite these books into modern English, involving just a little extra work that deters many people and limits competition for more entrepreneurial types.  Great contenders for this treatment include history books, books about witchcraft and paganism, early herbal and other medical books.