I stumbled up this website that is dedicated to showcasing the most interesting out-of-copyright works online. It’s true that everything falls out of copyright at some point in time and here is a non-for-profit site that organizes them. There are a lot of interesting articles on the site.
As a cheap college student, I absolutely love the public domain. It’s a great, free way to get a hold of classic literature and music. At my internship over the summer at a music publishing company, I heard a different opinion of the public domain. Publishers attempt to capitalize on the public domain by printing new versions of public domain works in new ways to tempt consumers to purchase their versions of the works rather than another publisher’s. This is an interesting way of viewing book (and music) publishing marketing techniques.
I would have to agree that I love public domain. A large chunk of books on my kindle are downloaded from the public domain. It is interesting that the publishers print new versions to make money off of it and it must work otherwise they wouldn’t do it.