How To Sell Public Domain Products on eBay

One of the fastest and easiest ways you can get started making money on eBay is to sell public domain information products.  The public domain contains a wealth of written materials from books to songs that have not been properly copyrighted.  This means great things for your business, as you can legally reference or resell any of these products without doing a thing to create them!

Materials in the public domain include:

• Materials published before 1923,
• Materials that are more than 28 years old, and
• Materials that are not properly copyrighted.

It’s a bit hard to tell whether or not a work is properly copyrighted.  In order for a book to be properly copyrighted it must contain something that looks like this:

© Copyright 1988, Beacon Publishing

So, if you find a work without an appropriate copyright, you may have just stumbled upon your next great investment!

Some profitable works that you can find to resell or reference in the public domain are:

• Recipes from old cookbooks,
• Old editions of popular classics,
• Collector’s items,
• Religious books,
• Recordings of old folk songs,
• Rare performances by famous musicians,
• Early educational texts and other historical reference texts, and
• So much more!

If you find an old book that you would like to resell, you’ll have to rescan the pictures and reprint them.  To do this, you’ll need a scanner and a high quality printer—or you can send the pages and images over to a print shop to be printed there.  The pages will also have to be scanned and cleaned up, or completely retyped altogether.  This can add up to a great deal of work over time, so you may want to think about posting this job to one of the freelance websites we discussed if you have a few other projects in the works as well.

You can piece together bits from a few old books in order to create one whole book that you can copyright yourself.  For instance, if you find a number of old poems in the public domain, you could gather all of these together and publish them in one whole collection.  Just be sure that they all relate to each other in some way—whether they be from the same era or about the same theme—so that your book is cohesive and meaningful.

Another way that you could use works from the public domain is to create your own audio book.  You may want to record the poems that we referenced earlier—as long as you have a good speaking voice and are able to translate the rhythm of the poems with your voice.  Audio books are in high demand these days, as people can listen to them on anything from their mp3 players to their car stereos.

When you’re looking to reprint and resell old books in the public domain, one of the best resources you can use to find these products are the used bookstores in and around your town.  Used bookstores are literally everywhere, some large and some small, but each store will offer its own unique variety of old books in the public domain.

Once you’ve found a book that you’re interested in reselling, all you have to do is check its copyright standing at www.copyright.gov/records/cohm.html.  If you find that the book you’re interested in has no legal copyright, you can proceed to the next steps of reprinting and reselling.

You can also search for books that are in the public domain by utilizing the University of Pennsylvania’s public domain database at http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books.  Not only will this website provide you with the names of books in the public domain, but you’ll also be able to download these books right to your computer from this website.

Old and used books can honestly be found everywhere, especially online.  Amazon has a huge inventory of used books—some that you can buy for as low as $1!  As long as you have the time to spare to look around, you should be able to find a wealth of potentially viable books in no time at all.

One other resource that you may want to consult to find works in the public domain is the Library of Congress.  You can download books, music, photographs, and more right from their website at http://www.loc.gov/library/libarch-digital.html.

However, before you decide to reprint and resell any work of any sort, be sure to check its copyright with the government website that we provided to you earlier.  You’re out to make a profit, not to get into legal trouble—so be sure to safeguard your business by researching your products beforehand!