Royalty Free Content Website – Episode #076

I had an idea based on your ideas.
For authors to purchase or download material from Smashwords and, not taking credit for them, but they can give that material out as bonus gifts on their own websites.

carpe noctem,
Your Friendly Neighborhood Usman

hmmm

YFN Usman

Hello Dale,

You have opened my mind in so manny ways, and now i have my book finished and i am proud of what came out, so really THANK YOU! you had a big role in it!


Best regards,
Alina

Really Dale, you are amazing!

First i just wanted to finish my book withoult thinking too much on what will happen after...
I had no ideea that there are so manny great things that you can do! You have opened my mind in so many ways, i had a lot of AHA moments and now i have a tone of ideeas i am excited about and can not wait to put them into practice.
I have made a detailed plan with all of my future activities, thanks to you!
In this moment my first book is ready, the cover also and now i am comparing the printing costs vs quality to decide where to print it.
I am happy that it is donne and i just wanted to say that you had a big role along this process so i just wanted to send you a big THANK YOU!


A big hug from Alina,
Romania- sorry for any writting mistakes!

Thanks Dale.

A note of caution. While the actual content of a book might be out-of-copyright, someone's markup of that content might still be in copyright.

For example, my site at http://www.write-better-english.com reproduces a book from 1918 called "The Elements of Style". That book is also available online from bartleby.com.

However, my lawyer told me that I could not simply copy and paste the text from bartleby.com and reformat it into an eBook of my own, because bartleby.com owns the copyright in the way they have marked-up the text. Instead, I had to find the actual hard copy book from 1918, scan in the pages, and convert the text myself.

People might say that no-one would be able to tell the difference between my legitimate version of the 1918 text and an illegitimate version of the 1918 text that someone has copied from someone else's website. However, I would know, and I could not in good conscience go along with it. Also, some companies deliberately place unique markers in their version of the text so that they can tell whether someone has lifted their version of the work. It does take quite a lot of work to scan in text and tidy-up the code and format it properly, so you can understand why companies want to protect their hard work.

I can share an experience where one of the freelancer-for-hire sites forbade a project in which the freelancer proposed to copy an out-of-copyright work from a public domain works website and reformat it, for the reason I mentioned above: the text of the work was in the public domain, but the way the public domain works website had coded and formatted that work was not.

Apart from the legal technicalities, there are other reasons for going back to the original hard copy source and not relying on someone else's reproduction: for instance, the reproduction might contain accidental flaws or be incomplete.

So, while it might be fine to download an out-of-copyright work and read it, it might be a different matter if you want to make a copy of someone else's copy of that work (if you get what I mean).

Among other things, make sure you read the licensing terms of the organisation or company that digitised the public domain work.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for the information, I didn't know there were so many free ebooks out there...

Great stuff, Dale. Not sure yet if I would actually use the free content but there's a lot of brilliant reading material there.

Yay, free content. Nice little tidbit with the website in this vid. I'll have to go check it out. Keep on keepin on buddy. See you again.

Thanks again for commenting Conner, I appreciate it. Dale