Looking for a new project

Over the last few years, I have dabbled in a number of business ventures. It keeps my brain alive to do so. And a little extra money never goes amiss in a household with children.

One type of business venture that has intrigued me is repackaging books that have come into the public domain. Being in the pubic domain means that the copyright has expired and anyone can reuse the materials. You can copyright a new version of the material but the original material remains open to anyone to use.

One excellent source of public domain materials is Project Gutenberg. Recently I was browsing the new materials posted there when I came across Peter the Great by Jacob Abbott, one of the Makers of History series published in the mid to late 1800s. I was immediately intrigued. This material reminded me of one of our favorite history resources; historical fiction by G. A. Henty written in the same time period and recently reprinted.

Could this be a project for me? I started researching and the more I read, the more I liked. Jacob Abbott was a prolific author and his writing was geared mainly to a younger audience with dozens of historical narratives as well as other stories such as the Rollo books. His work is continuing to come into the public domain giving me plenty of source materials for years to come.

I also discovered that his work is already being reprinted for the homeschool community. Far from being a discouragement, this verified my own feeling that his material would be attractive to that market.

Finding his work on a Living Books list published by Valerie's Living Books again simply reinforced what I was thinking.

Since my husband has long encouraged me to venture into audio books, and I had just learned how to do this and acquired the necessary equipment during another project last year, the idea of making an audio recording of this material was not long in materializing in my brain. Of course, I also found that this, too, had been done for some of JA's work. However, mine would include additional resources that would be very helpful to homeschoolers wanting to use this works in their history studies.

And so my history project began to take shape...