KDP allows publishing books that are in the public domain and thus anyone can make money
out of it, and many people are going after that.
Yes, anyone can republish Shakespeare!
Although, discussing the ethics and moral of doing that
is another subject altogether.
In this video, we are not going to see a list of resources to get your public domain book.
a simple Google search can give us a plenty of resources to find public domain books.
HOWEVER we will go over some best practices to ensure it's going to be a win-win situation
for everyone concerned - yourself, justice to the original work, and of course the readers for
buying the work from you.
It may be easy to publish a work that is not ours - but this also needs a lot of prudence
from our part.
For example, we must ensure the following ---
1.
that these are the books that are out of copyright - either because the author expired and a
specific no of years have passed or they are all intentionally released as public domain
- which, of course, goes unsaid that it's with us to validate and evaluate the public
domain content before we publish them.
when evaluating whether the book is in public domain or not, consider the author's lifespan,
especially the Date of death to calculate if 70 years have passed
- most countries that is 70 years, but could
vary for every country.
Thus we must ensure that the book is really in the public domain and there are no copyright
problems or claims associated with it.
2.
that the work is not available elsewhere freely for download, Amazon included.
3.
If you are fortunate enough to live near a library, go and look out for any old books
that could possibly be in the public domain.
You could start from here rather than picking up a book that has already been converted
into an electronic format.
Chances are that many others would be already working on the same work as you.
So the best bet is to pick a book that is yet to be digitalized.
4.
that the book you want to publish is not a direct rip-off but you have added your own
content in terms of illustrations, annotations, or translations to it.
since many public domain books are freely available online,
it takes a lot of work to make it unique so
people could buy from you.
Key changes that we can do is to create a new book's cover instead of using the old
one.
Also, simply just don't copy paste the text content,
instead carefully review each and
every word to ensure that there are no mistakes
in republished work - this so happens especially
when using OCR - the Optical Character Recognition software to
scan and read digital content - better manually review before publishing.
5.
Another key difference you could show is to translate the work in your native language.
Additionally create a glossary of all the unusual or difficult to pronounce words from
the book with meanings that regular readers like you and me can understand.
Especially with older books, people would love to know the historical background, contextual
examples, illustrative images, comparing with contemporaries to make one understand the
complex relationships between countries or nations, back then.
To conclude, and just to reiterate and remind, while choosing
a public domain book, we must first ensure that the same
book is not available for free either within Amazon Kindle store or anywhere else on the
internet.
If yes, then you must make it different by adding some extra valuable information to
the book before publishing it again on the Kindle store, after all you are trying to
make money out of it, so one must put an effort into reselling public domain books if we intend
to earn money out of it.
Thanks for watching.