You mean public domain? Here's how to do it...

It sounds like you're talking about works in the public domain.

I've talked to a few people who sell works in the public domain, which piqued my interest enough that now I've started to dabble too.

The first thing you need to do is brush up on your intellectual property and copyright laws so that you know what books you can consider. You have to take into consideration things like foreign copyrights as well. Also -- if you do find one that you'd like to repub, you should still have it looked over by a intellectual property attorney just to be safe. You don't want to "guess" that the copyright is clear, only to be slapped with a lawsuit down the line.

Now let's suppose you find one that's in the public domain. You might find it at your local book store, at yard sales, at a library book sale, on eBay, or any other number of places.

The next step is to scan it using a OCR scanner so you can get the printed book converted into a text file. If you don't have the scanner and software to do this yourself, www.bookscanning.com comes highly recommended (their prices are reasonable -- I think around $85 for a 200 page book, plus they don't rip your book up the way some scanners do).

After that, it's up to you. Since it's in the public domain, you can generally do as you please -- sell it as a physical product (even better, modify it before selling it so you have a "new" version of the book), use it as content on your site, turn it into an ebook, etc.

If you don't have a particular niche or particular book in mind and you'd rather have someone else check with attorneys and do the scanning, you can join a site like thelostfiles.com -- click here to reach the site (that's my aff link). Russell Brunson provides at least two books per month for you, both as PDF files and as text files. He also provides sales letters and the like.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,

Becky