: Re: Can I copy or publish, text from a website. Can I copy or publish text—from a website—that is in the public domain? The text was already published as hard cover, in many apps, and

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If it really is public domain you are free to do whatever you want*. You should keep in mind some things:

The fact that it is free does not mean that it is public domain. It could also be licensed under Creative Commons or something similar. Publishing it could then be illegal under some circumstances. Examples would be omitting the license, selling a CC-NC work or change a CC-ND work. In the latter case changing of the file format does not violate the license.
Copyright laws (and the criteria for public domain) depend on the country. A website hosted in Australia could host "The Story of My Experiments with Truth" by Gandhi as public domain without any problems, because Gandhi died earlier than 1955. It would be illegal to do the same in Europe, because he did not die at least 70 years ago. In fact for a European it would even be illegal to download them. At least add a disclaimer explaining where it is public domain (see Project Gutenberg for an example).
The website may simply be wrong when it claims that the content is public domain. For example in Germany copyright ends 70 years after the author has died. For this matter translators are authors. For example Antoine de Saint-Exupéry died in 1944, but the German translators of "The little prince" died 1952 (or later). So while the original would becomes public domain in 2015 the German translation would not. I guess you would be allowed to translate it yourself and publish your own translation, but I am not sure what implications this would have in countries where the work is not yet public domain.

*Some things may still not be allowed due to the personal right of the authors, but that is another topic.

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