Is this ethical?

All the words you could ever use in an ebook or an article are in the dictionary already. If you use several words from the dictionary are you ripping off Webster?

George Wright

I know George, but some people always have a hissy fit if what they wrote some months back appears in another ebook even if it is completely changed and rewritten and polished...I know JK Rowling wouldn't be too happy to see Hatty Patter on the shelves of Barnes & Noble lol

Don't most IM gurus do this? Oh wait, they charge for it.

Well Hatty Patter is a different animal. I thought you meant taking all the info you find read it set down and write up an ebook with your own twist.

And darn it how did you find out about the ebook I'm working on. Hatty Patter and the Guru slayer.

George Wright

From an ethical standpoint, I think you would be totally justified if you took other people's idea and improve upon it. Most companies try to always add to their product or service to improve the value of it. According to you, you would be taking the information from other sources and organize it in a way that's both useful and more user friendly to your customer.

Sparhawke...ideas can't be copyrighted. If you can write your ebook based 100% on what's in your head rather than what's in front of your eyes, then I wouldn't call you unethical. But what really matters is how YOU feel about it, because you're the one that lives with your decisions.

As long as you are ethical in whatever product, e-book, article you are going to produce and repackage. We all learn from each other, knowledge is free. The information is already out there anyway!

Just play the game right and dont do anything silly.

Oh and I actually used to live next door to a guy called Harry Potter....I thought he was trying a cheesy chat upline until he showed me his drivers licence.

Not sure why I am telling you that, anyway! Have fun,

Beth :-)

I read a lot of IM ebooks, and I mean a LOT, and always the first two or three chapters looks the same, that's because the system is the same, the twist you add is what sell you product.

Nobody can accuse you of plagiarism if you write on your book how to use Google keyword tool to research your market, or how to buy a domain name or a hosting account... who is withouth sin cast the first stone.

Anyway sometimes the joke is not as funny as the way you tell it.

It is just in my four months or so here I have read a lot of posts and when I go to put them in action parts are missing, they don't tell you the whole story or they are just full of mistakes that they are completely confusing...either that or the information is spread randomly through upto 20 pages sometimes which makes following it next to impossible...

So no one has a problem with anyone putting together a new, revised and easier to understand product?

Let me tell answer you with a real life example.

If you ask me, there is no need for any WordPress related book ever... everything you need to know it has been written and published (+maintained) by the countless volunteers working in the Codex - The online Docs.

Yet, there are dozens of paper books and e-books "teaching" WordPress - from installation to customization and so on. To be honest I have never seen one that adds anything that is not in the Codex.

However, the problem with the online documentation is its format that comes with the tool - mediawiki - used to publish it. Its structure relies heavily on hypertext (interlinked content with links jumping from one topic to another) and it doesn't have a linear structure.

On the other hand, all our previous learning experiences, starting from our writing system, time perception etc. are formatting our brain to process the information in a linear way: getting one step at a time from A... to Z. (And from left to right - for Westerners.)

So, basically, all the WP-books out there just re-package the existing information in a form that is easier to digest for our mindset. Because even if we like to think of ourselves as being the avantgarde of the internet users - we still like to consume the information in the more traditional way of successive steps.

If you can present the scattered information in a way that makes it easier to access it, go ahead.

Good luck!

I don't think its an issue at all... you educate yourself and then write down your own findings that you've culminated from several different sources... Every book is from someone who learned something or someone else... There are seldom any books that are created that contain material that have absolutely never been seen before by anyone

I don't see a problem with it. If you learn how to buy a house in one book, how to invest in another book, why not combine both of them into a real estate investing book. ( how many of those are out there )

I agree, that if you learn something from a lot of various places, and find that you have benefited from learning it, why not put it into a "one stop shop" book and put it out there for the world to see.

Napoleon Hill took info from 500 different people, put it into one place. I do think there is a line that you don't want to cross which would put you into the stealing category.

Don't they call this research?

Yes Bob...but I was asking how people will feel if they found out that something they had been working on a while appeared a few months later simply rewritten and repackaged and was doing a whole lot better lol

I am a newbie, I am not especially technical and usually I have a hard time understanding large lists of information...many people are like me too, we like bite sized chunks which are easy to digest in a language we are used to which doesn't make us feel inferior.

Many times in many forums over the years I have gone to read a guide and they all have one thing in common, they all expect you to know how to get from A to B via E, and never bother explaining it.

Imagine you are told to register a domain name for your business on beds...you may find a product telling you how to do keyword research but would that same material give you instruction on taking what could take hours of availability searching and condense it into just 5 minutes of searching?

Without skipping steps all over the place and assuming you know what to do anyway?

All of our knowledge is the sum total of numerous different sources. If you can put together your own product using the knowledge and research you've done, go for it. It's not as if you are copying chapters from each product to make your product.

Hmmmm...let me quantify what I meant by "research".

As sbucciarel (good golly, you need an easier name to pronounce...I'll call you Stongers hence forth "All of our knowledge is the sum total of numerous different sources" aka, everything we know we learned somewhere else first. Therefore, existing information reformatted, restated, and recompiled from various existing sources is not copying, it is a new product in its own right.

Have you ever written a research paper? How did you get the information for that? Obviously you didn't plagiarize your sources, but you did have sources, correct? So the short answer is no, it is not unethical... assuming that you are in fact adding your own information and recompiling the ideas and concepts learned elsewhere, rather than just copy/pasting.