The Public Domain Unleashed

Now that winter is coming to the northern hemisphere, fishermen of all stripes (except for ice fishermen) are getting ready for that long winter break. That means cleaning and packing their gear in anticipation of the first blush of spring, making sure their fishing magazine subscriptions are up to date and that they still have the fishing channels on their televisions.

And for the more enthusiastic fishermen, it means a winter of research and planning for new techniques to help them catch the big one. That will include reading about the latest gizmos that are on the market and reminiscing about days gone by, days when they went fishing with their fathers with nothing more than a simple pole and natural baits - like worms, crickets and other homemade concoctions.

And for those who enjoy fly fishing, they invest their winter hobby hours researching and tying new flies to try for the upcoming spring fishing season.

Since these fishermen are always looking for new - and forgotten - techniques to make them better fishermen, what better place than the public domain.

There are many old fishing books that are in the public domain that can be republished as is or reworked into new books to help safisy their itch.

Just to give one simple example of a great project you could do… suppose you gathered a few public domain fishing books and extracted out the natural bait recipes contained in them and published a brand new guide called something like “Secret Natural Fishing Baits” or “Tried and True Natural Fishing Baits” and marketed it to this crowd. Do you think some of them would be interested?

Or suppose you gathered a few public domain illustrated fly fishing books, extracted the pictures and made a coffee table book of fly fishing lures or a fly fishing workbook from the materials.

The ways you can repurpose this material are endless.

Here are some searches to help you find some of the many public domain fishing books (at least some of the ones that have been digitized and are online.

Google book search on fishing

Google book search on fly fishing

You may be wondering just how big the fishing market is. Well in the United States, just the fly fishing market as reported by the American Fly Fishing Trade Association (AFFTA) is approximately 13 million in size. And according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service, the number of people who fish in the U.S. is greater than 35 million.