Yes, I understand your concern. Unfortunately, with a public domain text there's not much you can do.
You can add your own introduction, which would be your copyright, but there would be little to stop anyone just stripping off your introduction and using the text itself.
But I suspect that you won't find this a problem in practice. If you can establish yourself as a publisher of quality, then people will look for your imprint for future books, not some fly-by-night.
I don't know whether it would be possible to do this full-time to start with. You'd need to build up a catalogue of titles over time to bring in sufficient income, I'd expect.
If you are thinking of doing this full-time, you should definitely look into producing paper books too - Print-on-Demand ones. Check out this web site for useful information on doing this through lightning source.
http://www.newselfpublishing.com/
Quote:
Originally Posted by kurochka
My concern is that once I sell one copy of a public domain book (for which I worked months if not years), there is no legal or moral restriction for somebody else distributing this same copy for a fee or free to millions. I have no problem with that when it's just a hobby for me but now I am considering doing it full time.
I have in mind extremely high quality proof-read multivolume dictionaries or other serious works, not a quick OCR job for an easy-reading novel.
|