Quote:
Originally Posted by granturissimus
i'm not planning to do this, but i wonder if its possible to get one of those old out of copyright books from a hundred years ago, and type it up and publish in the kindle store and even possibly sell it on there.
is this possible/legal?
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Legal: yes and no. It's legal to publish your own edition, but it's not legal to re-publish someone else's. Book design and artwork all have their own copyrights. Another publisher's edition of a PD book may contain their own new copyrighted design, page ornaments, and such. If you want to make your own edition of a Project Gutenberg book I suggest that you avoid their ePub and MOBI versions as a source. To legally distribute a commercial version derived from their material you must remove
ALL references to PG and some of these references are buried deep and require more than simple editing to remove.
Make money? Maybe. There are a lot of free versions of almost all PD books so it's hard to create an edition that adds enough value to become successful when it has to compete with the free editions. Also, some book vendors, Amazon in particular, will refuse to sell this type of book unless it does add value. Amazon recently removed 100s of books of this type that had begun to clutter their ebook store.