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"Authors (and reporters) get professionally dinged for plagiarism."
That's separate actually from Copyright, though it often violates copyright. If you simply edit sex, name & places in a book, retitle it and put a different author name, all without explaining source then even out of copyright, it's plagiarism. Passing off someone else's work as your own.
However if it's out of copyright, or you have permission from the rights holder, then it may not be plagiarism if you CLEARLY acknowledge the source and explain the value of what you are doing and the reason for it.
Regular tricks of publishers to renew copyright are:
New Illustrations
Different layout and/or font*
Update LSD to metric £ & p.
Update popular culture references.
(* Thus a straight copy breaks copyright, you'd need to OCR and proof to get back to original text. This is why CURRENT editions of say the King James Bible are copyright even though the actual content is not copyright).
So if you take a public domain textfile, mobi or epub, proof it, reformat and publish you have the Copyright on the new ebook. If you take it and update language, change title and put yourself as Author with no reference to source then it's plagiarism, even though original was out of copyright and you have valid copyright on the new edition.
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