looking for copyright-free, public domain works

[esllou]

quite humdrum requirement really....to make reading comprehensions for an education site

bet you all thought I was putting together ANOTHER adsense site :-)

so I am after anything as I need to put together 50-100 pages of reading comprehensions....open questions, true/false, multiple choice and also more complicated stuff like multiple matching and gapped text exercises...but I need the content and it doesn't matter if it is from 1924...though a lot of the public domain bartleby.com type stuff is from 1870 and not much use for the students!

don't know if it would be ok to post url's here or not, but you could PM me some stuff too which I would appreciate. Googled around and found some sites but wouuld always be happy to find more

can be fiction, tourist info, travel guides, anything at all...it would be better to have different types of text too, not just classic literature.

any help appreciated.....

[rogerd]

The kind of content you need is less likely to be found online than in libraries and used book shops. I'd suggest reading up on copyright law, finding some obscure texts that appear to be well beyond their copyright expiration date, and scanning them. Realistically, old tourist brochures and the like are unlikely to result in someone chasing after you. Be careful, of course, and do a bit of online research to be sure that an old book hasn't been reissued with an updated copyright. By evaluating the materials you find, you can assess the probability of a copyright issue down the road. You could probably find a very inexpensive student to scan, OCR, and proof for you. I'd also choose texts with clear, easily scannable text that are unlikely to cause OCR errors. If you buy some cheap old books, you could even cut the pages out for sheet-fed scanning. (I admit that it pains me as a book-lover to think about cutting books up...)

That's not to say you couldn't find some material online (government sites often have copyright-free content), but you may spend a long time hunting.

[lucertola]

If you haven't already tried it, you may find something here
[creativecommons.org...]