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Originally Posted by etienne66
I would have thought I would have some rights to the HTML formatting code I wrote, but not the text itself.
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You do. As I've said previously, in the UK and most other countries (but perhaps not the US), you automatically hold a "typographical copyright" on the
formatting of the book which lasts for 25 years. Although the text itself is in the public domain, people can't just make direct copies of your version of it. They can reformat it and THEN do what they wish with it, however.
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I find this somewhat odd, because I know if I were to reprint the original book, you could not just walk into a bookstore and take it without paying for it even though the text itself is in the public domain. If that were true why would anyone bother to reprint classic books such as "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer".
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In the case of a printed book, it's the physical object itself that you're buying. It's a very different situation.
Most publishers who are "serious" about classics - eg "Oxford World Classics" or "Penguin Classics" - add scholarly introductions, footnotes, etc, to them. That's why they are sold as full-priced paperbacks and why people buy them. Publishers who reprint just the public domain text generally sell their books very, very cheaply.
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It sounds like to me you could buy any public domain ebook from Amazon and then publish it for sell without change as long as the images in the ebook are in the public domain as well.
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Yes, that's pretty much true, but note what I said above about typographical copyrights.