Orbus sensualim pictus for the modern language learner

May 13, 2011 3:59 AM

I'm trying to find public domain e-books of English language teaching material that I can adapt into online courses.

As a lark, I'm planning on adapting some old (think vintage) language learning books into online courses. Part of this is just curiosity about how older material will look in a digital format (for example, adapting this old book), another part of it is a desire to use public domain material to create sellable courses that have some pedagogical quality. It's mostly an experiment.

I have a few questions related to this:
1. What's the easiest way to find public domain e-books for learning and teaching English? I've done a bit of searching on Google books but I was wondering if there were some particularly good search terms or other online resources that would have these. Ideally I'd love to have some books with grammar / vocabulary exercises that I could use.
2. Is it a matter of publication date? I.e., can I rely on books from a certain time period to be public domain? What's the latest time period I can use?
3. What are the usage rights for this sort of material? Is it possible to take, for example, a language learning book from 1920 and use the material for profit?

I'm a newbie to all this, so help is greatly appreciated!

Thank you!

posted by mammary16 to education (3 answers total)

The main other source of public domain work is archive.org.
posted by shii at 5:23 AM on May 13, 2011

I found some grammar books with a quick search on Project Gutenberg, maybe you can find more books of interest there. They also have a few points about what copyright means for these books.
posted by gakiko at 6:44 AM on May 13, 2011

I'm not an expert so this is only my understanding.

You can rely on American books published before 1920-something to be public domain. Different countries have different laws. You can try looking around Wikipedia, or Wikimedia, for more info on copyright and public domain -- they would know. Project Gutenberg also has extensive explanations of how to know whether such-and-such is in the public domain.

Also according to my understanding, you can make money off of public domain books. I see a lot of books in the Kindle store that e-book "publishers" are trying to con people into paying a few dollars for, when they can be found for free. I also see on Amazon “publishers” selling their own editions, on-demand-printing, of out-of-print, public-domain books.
posted by thebazilist at 7:18 AM on May 13, 2011