eBooks Plus . . . Notes, Annotations, Audio Files: How to Secure Copyright over Public Domain Materials
August 2, 2010
There is a huge inventory of public domain books out there. Anything published in the United States earlier than 1923 is eligible for reprinting, royalty-free. Anything published from 1923 to the end of 1963 is in the public domain if the copyright was not renewed in year 28 after the original publication date.
You can re-package it and sell it. But you cannot legally secure ownership rights to it.
Unless you add information to it.
How? You can re-write it. You own what you write. Another way is to add notes. Your notes are yours.
But there is a third way coming. This is going to be big. Huge. It is the annotated eBook.
Mark Goldblatt's novel, Sloth, is such a book. You can read it onscreen, which includes Kindle, iPod, and iPad. This is how people like to read these days.
Goldblatt describes the eBook of the future. His article is here. (You can access it by putting the cursor over the highlighted word and clicking.) He calls it the cursor eBook. He thinks people already read this way. He writes:
Cursor-prompted annotations are one of many changes on the e-book horizon -- and perhaps the least dramatic. These changes will necessarily alter the entire calculus that goes into a book's creation. Consider: We now live in a world in which, for the first time, there are two distinct ways to read: 1) with your eyes alone, and 2) with a cursor. The two ways to read point to two very different reading experiences… and that difference will affect not only how books are acquired and published but also how they are imagined and executed.The experiential possibilities of an e-book are not limited to the words on the screen. With inevitable hardware advances, there will eventually be suspense novels, for example, with creepy background music and momentary visual effects. As the heroine steps inside the seemingly deserted house, a bass line will pulse through your headset. As you scroll across the words, "She heard a sudden rustling of wind through the tattered curtains," you'll hear a rustling. Then, as your pulse quickens, when the villain leaps out from behind the curtains, an animated graphic will emerge from behind the words on the screen to menace you for a split second, then recede.
As unsettling as such innovations may seem, they needn't encroach on the experience of traditional readers -- not even those seduced by the siren song of a Nook, Kindle or iPad. The option of sight reading, of scanning down the page line by line, without using the cursor, will always remain. But the range of new possibilities is sure to impact how writers write; many will write with an e-book specifically in mind. They will become orchestrators as well as wordsmiths -- deciding, in the case of Sloth, what to annotate, but, in the future, deciding what to score, what to illustrate and what to animate. The results will be hybrids… not unlike the way today's graphic novels are hybrids of traditional novels and comic books.
This is the way to read Shakespeare. It is the way to read the King James Version of the Bible. You can find out what an expert says is the correct meaning of an archaic word.
This strategy can be used for technical words.
Already, Wikipedia does this. The highlighted words take you to other Wiki entries. But you must click the cursor to activate the link. It takes you to the entry. Not with Goldblatt's book. You touch; up pops what you need to know. It can be used for foreign words. It can be used for references to historical events.
If you already know the word, you just keep reading. You are not slowed down. But if you don't know, you can find out easily. You won't have to guess. You won't be as tempted to skip over the word.
This is surely the way to read Russian novels. Every character has a pop-up. That's a lot of pop-ups. Russian novels have lots of characters.
There will be sites created to sell only annotated eBooks. I call these eBooks Plus. That's why I secured www.eBooksPlusNotes.com, www.eBooksWithNotes.com, and www.AnnotatedeBooks.com. I think there will be companies ready to sell these specialized and more valuable books. Someone is going to want to buy one of these domains. I'm here to help!
In every category, there are classic books that can be turned into products that people will pay for.
Think of a well-known college professor or expert. He can go to a site such as Project Gutenberg, download a book in text mode, add links, typeset it with a program such as InDesign, and publish his own library of classic books. He secures lifetime copyright. His estate retains ownership of these products for 75 years after his death.
Think of an unknown assistant professor. He does the same thing, except that he has a second site, available only to his students. He posts these annotated books there for free. It is considered bad form to assign your books to your students, but only if they are asked to pay for them.
He could post these books online for a specific period of time, with this stipulation: personal use only -- no re-sale. Other professors can assign them to their students for free. Students like this. The assistant professor's name gets widely known. Even if he makes no money on the sale of the books, he gets his name out there. It increases his employability.
In every field, a person can establish his name by adding value this way.
To see how I did this, click here: