Public Domain Meets Online Marketplace

Public Domain Material Meets the Online Auction Marketplace

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Online auction sites like eBay.com are some of the most profitable and easiest ways to make money online with public domain material and here is how: Every item under the sun is being sold or has been sold on eBay, two of the most popular or common of those items are books and e-books. If you are unfamiliar with what an ebook is, in short an ebook is simply a book in electronic format, meaning it can be opened and read on one's computer. With this in mind, consider the potential market for your public domain material in electronic format. Below are some simple steps to begin selling public domain material on the eBay marketplace.

If you don't already have one, you will need to setup an account through eBay and PayPal. In order to sell any merchandise on eBay you have to be a registered user, plain and simple, there is no way around it. PayPal is an online payment processing service, widely used by eBay patrons, if you intend to make any money selling on eBay you will need a PayPal account. They are both free accounts.
Now that your accounts are setup, open up the eBay homepage and next to the main search bar click on Advanced search. Fill in your search criteria, something like vintage book, books, etc. use your creativity, and then select "completed listings only" and hit enter. By searching completed listings you have the opportunity to see how many of each book has sold, what they are selling for and the amount of interest in each auction or the amount of bids each receives.
Browse through these results until you find a popular vintage or old book, in other words one that has sold well, and write down all of the books information ie. title, author etc.
Now what you have successfully done is built a good working list of popular vintage books for you to source. You may start by running searches through the search engine, for an already existing electronic format of the particular work, and/or visit your local library to see if they have that book in stock for you to check out.
If you found the book in its original format, for instance from the library, you will need a scanner and what is called OCR software, often times it comes with the purchase of a scanner, basically OCR software will convert the scanned images to editable text, for you to edit and make changes as you wish.
You can now take this editable text you have scanned from the book and repackage it as your very own ebook. You will want to keep the structure of the book intact, but you can dress it up, maybe add a nice title page or something to make it appear professional.
Congratulations! You have just created your very own ebook from free public domain material, and best of all it is ready to be marketed on eBay. What you have done, is taken a book you already know is popular from your completed listings searches and converted it to electronic format, allowing you to sell multiple copies of this particular work. Now keep in mind that you can't sell this ebook for the same amount as others have done with the original, because the original is a vintage book. You can however sell as many copies as you would like at a lower price, allowing you to rake in some serious cash.