Frequently Asked Questions

Is this free to use?

Yes. An optional donation of $5 per piece used is suggested and highly appreciated. You do NOT need a PayPal account to make a donation! Just a credit card.

public domain book

Public Domain Books and Free Electronic Texts

When a work is in the public domain, it means that the work is free to use without paying royalties. Some people publish and sell public domain titles and make a good living out of it while other creative plagiarizers wrap their own words around the original work and get rich by re-naming the work and claiming it as their own. This is commonly known as creating derivative works.

These resources are handy if you want to read free books online or wish to publish a regular book or an ebook. It helps if you know what you are looking for. For example, if you know that a particular title's copywright has expired, it's pretty easy to find it by title or author.

On the other hand, if you have defined a market for a particular interest, you can just browse around the public domain sources to create a product that matches your market. For example, if your target market is health and fitness, you might find an old classic diet or fitness book and republish it into ebook format.

Public Domain and Free eText Sources

Here is a few resources where you can get free public domain books and free electronic texts.

Project Gutenberg - Project Gutenburg claims to be the Internet's oldest producer or ebooks or electronic texts. You can search their database by title, author or subject. The subject field comes in handy if you are looking to create products for a target market. The site has full instructions on how to define your search and files can be viewed in text format online or you can download zipped texts to your hard drive.

Internet Public Library - has over 20, 000 titles you can browse. Search by author or title. The books can be viewed online in txt or html and zip versions of each format can be downloaded. The download links do not open in a new window so you might like to right mouse click on the download links and select the "save as" option to download.

Search eBooks - seems to have thousands of texts available to read online. You have one search field. Results shown provide two links for each result. One to read the text and the other is the home page of the provider. If you have difficulty finding what you want while searching more than one word, try closing the search string with "inverted commas" as this will produce a different result.

It's more difficult to find help, terms of use and specific copywrite information at this site. Still a handy resource because search results load quickly. To find more copywrite info about titles at Search eBooks, it might be a good idea to re-search the titles at Internet Public Library or Project Glutenberg.

Check Copyright First

It is suggested that you check the specific copyright information for each title if you intend to re-publish any public domain book.

Some of the titles copyright information are straight forward while others are difficult to even find. Still others have been slightly modified so they are not the original work, but rather, a derivative work.