Put Public Domain Content To Work On Your Web Site

Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 at 1:44 pm

: Image via Wikipedia

It’s possibly that you have heard of public domain publishing as a pathway to making money online and it works great but today, I want to tell you about a twist on that idea that can have you bringing in extra income almost right away.

First, though, the basics. As you might know, many books and other works have gone into the public domain (fallen out of copyright protection) and can be republished, in any form, by anyone who undertakes to do so. In the U.S. most works published through 1923 are now considered to be public domain (”PD”).

If you uncover a PD book you believe others would buy if it were republished, you could reprint it as a physical book and sell copies on eBay, Amazon or your own web site. Some enterprising individuals have done this with old correspondence courses and other non-fiction, how-to type materials from years ago.

Alternatively, you could format your PD discovery as an e-book and make it available for people to download, for a price. This is probably the more usual way that people are bringing in money now from the public domain.Again, how-to, self-improvement and other non-fiction works will prove to be the most profitable.

Now about that little twist I mentioned. The method I prefer is to make PD books freely available on the web, and place advertising on their pages. Strictly speaking, then, you are selling ad space, not the book itself.

A few years a guy named Steve Smith heard about an interesting book from 1892 that combined a time-travel tale with a story about golf. Its title was Golf In the Year 2000.

Afer a bit of looking, he was able to find a copy of the book for just $10. He scanned the pages, converted them with opitcal character reading software, and posted the whole book to a site he had registered specifically for that purpose.

Then he took it the next step. On his site’s pages, he surrounded the book’s text with Google AdSense and affiliate merchant ads. This enabled him to make money from visitors clicking the AdSense or buying things. By the way, if you’re curious you can view his site at www.golf-in-the-year-2000.com.

Steve’s online edition of Golf In the Year 2000 attracts a steady flow of golf enthusiasts, science fiction fans, Victorian literature lovers and the simply curious, he says. And the ads on his pages bring him money!

I’m certain this is something that many other people could copy. Public-domain sources are abundant nowadays. You might be able to find a suitable book in one of the many web-based PD collections, preferably something that not many other people have discovered yet.

The good thing about this idea is that the book you showcase (and use to earn ad revenue) need not be restricted to non-fiction or how-to. As with Steve’s weird little golf/science fiction find, it can just be something that will attract visitors to your web site, for the sheer novelty if nothing else.

You could also look in used-book stores to try to find something rare enough not to have made it to the Internet at all. In that case you will probably need to buy a scanner and some OCR software to get the text into your computer.

Public domain publishing is indeed a potentially lucrative area.Further, how you “repurpose” your public domain finds is completely up to you. That’s what makes it so fun, as well as profitable.

This method of publishing public domain material is described at some length in this article, along with recommendations for further reading.

If you are interested in selling actual used books online, as on Amazon or eBay, there’s a downloadable report available that shows a new and mega-profitable way to do it. Check it out here or read an excellent review of it at Can You Still Make Money Selling Used Books on Amazon?