Quote:
Originally Posted by dwig
Quite true. All of the above discussion should be considered only for public domain books or books that you, the person doing the distribution, holds the copyright.
Most Creative Commons books, though free to redistribute in their original form, would likely be illegal to redistribute after altering them to add comments. Even if redistribution in an altered form was permissible under the particular CC license in use, that redistribution would most likely have to be totally free; no distribution charge, no advertisement, ... .
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Even if the book is offered free at a site like Smashwords they do include a disclaimer asking for the reader to 'buy their own copy' of said book if they haven't already. And that is even more important if the book is just being offered for free for a limited time (such as during the summer/winter sale at Smashwords). So even if you get the book at 100% off the price you still don't have the right to pass it on to someone else. If the readers are all in one family (husband/wife/kids) then the sharing might be overlooked (I don't know for sure) but you can't just pass on a copy to someone else (a friend or co-worker say). That is why Amazon has the 'lend' feature for books that you buy from them I think. And I think you can only 'lend' each book once, to one person at most.