What Are The Legal Requirements To Sell An Ebook?

Libby and OverDrive are my favorite resources for free ebook rentals. Recently I’ve borrowed popular titles such as Atomic Habits from my local library through their digital collections. For classics, I highly recommend Project Gutenberg where I read Jane Eyre last winter. Many universities offer public access to their digital collections which can include lesser known books. It is always worth checking the free ebooks offered by your local library through their website as they can often offer a wider selection of books than the more well known platforms.

One of the reasons I love exploring out PLR ebooks is that they can save me so much time to create. Most PLR ebooks come with some form of commercial rights, however the specific rights do vary. I have come across many licenses that allow you to sell the ebook that you have purchased, but not to resell it in a membership site or as part of a package of other products. Others allow you to use the content in your own products such as courses and workbooks. It is always wise to check the commercial rights of the PLR ebook you are purchasing before you buy. When I purchase PLR ebooks, I need to remember that licenses aren’t all created equal. Some will allow for you to rebrand the PLR ebook as your own under a ‘private label rights’ clause, and others will restrict the user heavily. If you find a PLR ebook that you’re looking to purchase, ensure that the seller describes the ebook as ‘commercial use allowed’ in the description. Even then, I contact the seller to confirm. It’s always better to err on the side of caution. Be aware of the sites offering cheap PLR ebooks (even from lesser-known sites). Compare them with PLR Mini Store or BuyQualityPLR which are reviewed well by other users. While cheap PLR ebooks may look tempting, they are often sold without any rights (including reselling) and of poor quality. Investing in a higher quality PLR pack even for occasional use will result in better licensing terms and in more varied and useful content.

A lot of confusion in this conversation about the download of e-books from Cengage can be resolved by one basic fact: you need to have a Cengage account with an active entitlement for the book you want to download. The rest is just technology and process. In other words, how does your account get an active entitlement for a book? You can purchase a digital access code online through retailers such as Amazon etc etc, you can purchase e-books online through Cengage.com, your course may use Cengage’s learning platform and your professor may have set up the book as part of the course’s inclusive access option, or you may have subscribed to Cengage Unlimited. In each of these cases, once the link to the book has been established on your account, you can download the e-book from Cengage’s apps. If you don’t see a download button in the apps, it typically means that the link hasn’t been established (e.g. you are logged in with the wrong account or the purchase hasn’t gone through yet etc etc).

Profit? $20 here and there isn’t very consistent. But I’m a fluker, and from time to time I manage to find some trash to flip. Like this self-published (woo!) Martian gardening guide from 2012 or so that I managed to sell to a subreddit for $25 or so. Most of these work in weird little niches – abandoned web serials, out-of-print fan theories, obscure, out-of-print academic tomes. Don’t even get me started on trying to sell bestsellers – it just isn’t worth it. Also, always be sure to check for any copyright violations. A potential $8 profit just isn’t worth it.

Has Kristen's Archives been given permission by the author/publisher to distribute these e-books? If the works are public domain or have been published on the site under a license (and that license has been explicitly stated), then yes, it is legal to download these e-books from Kristen's Archives. When in doubt, I opt for legal sources of e-books: purchasing e-books from stores, borrowing e-books from library apps, and recognized public-domain and licensed e-book archives that detail the permissions granted. Many unauthorized e-book sites carry malware and poor scans of e-books. For my own safety as well as that of authors and publishers, I steer clear of such sites. I generally prefer to support the authors of my favorite e-books by purchasing their work through official channels. However, there are times when informal archives of public-domain or licensed e-books are useful.

If you have an original story that you want to self-publish as a PDF book, here’s how I would approach things. First, make sure your story is the best it can be. Get it beta read or send it to critique partners. Once you have a solid story, focus on presentation. Your book’s cover can look amazing even if you don’t have design experience. Many free online tools, including Canva, have easy-to-use templates to create great-looking covers. Don’t under-estimate the power of proper formatting. A self-published PDF can look a real mess if you haven’t got the font, spacing and margins on your story just right. For a cheap alternative to Microsoft Office, LibreOffice or Google Docs are great. For selling PDFs, there are plenty of self-publishing platforms that make it easy, like Gumroad or Sellfy. Just set your price, and upload your book. Consider offering a free sample to any potential customers to give them a taster of your work. Then, promote your book on places like TikTok or Tumblr. Share plenty of visual snippets to engage your followers, and don’t give up. Keep posting and interacting with your followers.

It’s taken me 20 minutes or so to read this lot as opposed to opening up a book and I have to admit that there’s a bit of irony here. Time to close up shop here on Reddit and fire up my Kindle.

Unfortunately, the answer to this question is simple: no. You cannot transfer a book you bought from Amazon Kindle Store to another reading app. This is because of the way that DRM works: to allow reading books on various devices, it is locked to specific apps. And circumventing the DRM even for personal reasons is illegal. When buying ebooks, you should look for stores that sell DRM-free books and read them on ebook readers that allow you to read DRM-protected ebooks as well. There are several DRM-free stores, like for example Humble Bundle, Project Gutenberg or even the author’s website. As for people who have already bought a book and want to format-shift it to another app, ethically speaking, you should be allowed to do that with a purchased item. However, there just isn’t a legal way to do it. Your best bet is to stick to the free official apps of the retailer where you bought your ebook (Kindle for Kindle books, Kobo for Kobo books, etc.). These apps can read your DRM’ed ebooks within their own ecosystem, unlocked for you. The locked garden of inconvenient ebook readers is the price we pay for the locked garden of low ebook prices and vast ebook selection.

I get this question a lot because the book should be in the public domain given its age and influence. However, copyright lasts for a long time. Pauline Réage (the author under the pseudonym) published the book in 1954. In the US, the copyright will expire 95 years after the date of publication, so that would be 2049. Therefore, there is currently no free version of the book from a legitimate source such as Project Gutenberg. All versions of the book are for sale commercially or you can try to get it through a library. Often older books are put on sale for $1.99 or so for a short time, so you might look for a price drop and set up a price drop alert at ereaderiq.com for the Kindle edition.

My last thought for the day concerns discoverability vs. deprivation. I do think that piracy often serves as a discovery model for authors – allowing readers to ‘try before they buy’. However, very quickly it can devolve into depravation – people consuming media without ever contributing to the author’s earnings in any way. This ‘discovery’ model needs to transition into ‘supporting this author’. So you used that free PDF to ‘try’ an author – great! Now support them if you like their work. Buy their next book, pre-order it, get it from the library (since they paid the license for you), spread the word online… discover an author via the free sample, then become a paying reader for subsequent work by that author. That’s a sustainable relationship for the stories you love.