You've all seen them, "Get 10,000 EBOOKS for one Penny", "Buy 12,000 Ebooks with resale rights", "Over 15,000 EBOOKS with rights". There are lots of sellers of these items on eBay.  But what do you expect to get?
Well, here are a few things you should expect:

Most of these EBOOKS are reprints of "public domain" information.  It may have been produced by the government, a government agency or under contract to the government.  All of this type of information is considered "public domain" in that it can be copied and reproduced because it is not copyrighted.  Very few original authors will sell their work for one penny, although a few will.  You will find such things as the Constitution of the United States, the Bill of Rights, Lincoln's Gettysburg address. and similar documents that are truly public information included in your cache of ebooks.  You may also find many classical literature novels included, since copyright status has run out on them, and they are freely disseminated via many methods.  Jules Verne's "Around the world in 80 Days", Herman Melvil's "Moby Dick" and other classic novels may be included.

There may be sections on Computers, Health, Investment and Finance, Video Game Cheat Codes, Social Security, Retirement, and others.  However, don't expect this information to be current, and up to date.  The computer section probably contains info on computers that are 10 or more year old  (286, DX66, DOS, Windows 3.1, 1200 and 56K baud modems, and setting up and running a Bulletin Board System), all of which is only of historical significant to some, but useless to most.  The health sections may include diet information, recipes, and How To articles on stopping smoking, weight loss, personal health, etc. similar to that found regularly in newspapers, and magazines or which can be picked up for free in you Doctor's office or Pharmacy.  Reports with statistical data are probably over 10 years old.  Sections on Mortgages, financial investments, and debt reduction will contain old information, and generally accepted advice that was offered 15-20 years ago by high schools.  The Cheat Codes for video games are probably for Atari era games, and not for current ones. Sections on Insurance, Social Security, Retirement planning and Medicare should be viewed with skepticism in light of changing laws, changing benefits, and current offerings.

Liberally sprinkled within the folders of these large zipped download files will be multiple copies of software applications that will allow you to open web pages and buy additional ebooks from the vendor or his company.  Since it is likely that every folder contains this information, at least 20% of the information received will be duplicated more than once.  You may receive an application that allows you to format and write an eBook that you can then sell.  There are many eBook authoring programs available, many with full control so that you are the recipient of any benefit gained, whereas these may have hooks to the sellers web site only and benefits him, not you.

In addition, the resale rights given with each purchase allow you to reproduce and resell the information received.  This might be OK, if the data is useful, but often times the files are old Microsoft Write based files which have become corrupted in the multiple copying and re-zipping, and therefore may not be complete, or may be corrupted.  Although Wordpad will open most of these files, they will display lots of unrecognized characters at the beginning and end of the article, and in some cases this corruption will contain parts of the article duplicated, and may be some of the article omitted.

Many times this "treasure of information" will be sold for a penny, with two or three dollars shipping when in actuality, there is no shipping involved, that cost obviously just covers the listing fees.  You will be sent an email with a download link and can spend 30 or more minutes (at DSL speeds) of your time downloading 5 or 6 compacted files of 20-30 megabytes each.  It appears that almost 100% of the sellers of these large eBook collections are selling the same thing, same corrupted files, same outdated information, same Classic Literature, same diet recipes.

The real questions are:  1) Are you willing to resell this information in the same condition it is received without hours of editing, cleanup, and repackaging?  2) Would you include this information on your website without further research and up-dating and revising of the information?  3) Can you get rich reselling the same package of corrupt files that a couple of dozen others are selling?  4) Is the real reason to sell this stuff to get traffic to your or someone else's website via the buyer who searches for something among the nothing thousands of files he's just downloaded?  I think the answers  to these questions are 1. NO, 2. NO, 3. NO, 4. YES,  get the muggle to your sales site and maybe you can get some more money out of him!

So, dear reader of this guide, throw some money at these schemes if you wish, but only in the name of research and education for yourself, and not expecting anything of real value.  If you find something in them that you can use, you are a winner, and your time and money will be well spent.  If you don't, you were warned:  Caviat Emptor! (for those of you who didn't take Latin, that says "Buyer Beware".

If this guide has been helpful, and informative, please indicate so below.

I remain,
inadaze