Just for fun, I want to include a bookshelf in my game with a real book (or few) that you can actually read.
Would I run into any legal trouble if I included an out of print book in the public domain, such as Pride and Prejudice or Alice in Wonderland?
Getting legal advice on GameDev.StackExchange is not a great idea.
Having said that, if a work is truly in the public domain, you can do whatever you want with it.
Yes and no. "Public domain" does mean that, by definition, you can do whatever you like with that creative property.
However there's an important caveat here. What's public domain is the underlying story, not every specific creative work based on that story. So, like, you could have a book titled Alice in Wonderland, but its cover can't be Disney's Alice in Wonderland.
Watch for different copyright terms in different countries. Just because a book's copyright has expired in your country does not mean it has expired in all countries in which you plan to distribute the game. Though the Berne Convention sets a minimum copyright term of 50 years after the death of the author, countries are free to set a longer copyright term. If you have questions unanswered by Wikisource's copyright resources, ask on Law Stack Exchange.
Other issues that you may run into are that the books may make the game bigger to download and may affect your game's rating from ESRB or foreign counterparts.
Public domain content is by definition not copyrighted (anymore), so it is perfectly acceptable to use that. However, there are some things to keep in mind:
As others have noted, being in or out of print has nothing to do with copyright status, beyond my point above that in-print versions of public domain works likely contain copyrighted materials added later.
Project Gutenberg is a good source if you are planning on marketing in/from the US only, and generally a good source for accurate publishing dates on specific versions of books.
"Would I run into any legal trouble if I included an out of print book in the public domain, such as Pride and Prejudice or Alice in Wonderland?"
Careful there, out of print has nothing to do with public domain. A book can be public domain and still be in print, or it can be out of print without being public domain. Also, a book can be public domain in one country and still have 50 years copyright protection in another. And if I were to write a new translation of the Bible, maybe even add a couple illustrations, that new translation would not be public domain, unless I as the rights holder say so.
A book is either public domain because the rights holder decided to make it public domain, or it's public domain because the copyright has expired.
You can use anything that's public domain to make a profit. You can even print the book and sell it. You can use public domain models in your game, public domain textures, and public domain music. Careful with the music: just because Beethoven lived a long time ago does not mean a 20 year old recording of a piece written by Beethoven is public domain - it's not.
EDIT: If you can make out the rights holder you might even be able to include content that still has a copyright. Just ask them and they might say yes. It's publicity, after all.
I'm not a game developer, but I just happened to stumble across your question. I am a writer and journalist, and I've written about copyright many times in the past.
If you're specifically thinking of Alice in Wonderland, the answer to your question is an unqualified YES. The book is old enough that the copyright has expired everywhere in the world, so you can do whatever you like with it: Publish excerpts or the full-text within your game, base parts of the game or the whole thing on it, turn Alice into a crack addict living on Mars, whatever you want. That's what "public domain" means. It's out of copyright and ANYONE IN THE PUBLIC has the right to use it. In the U.S. especially it's sometimes difficult to know if something's in the public domain, but you can safely assume that anything from the 19th century (Alice in Wonderland, Sherlock Holmes, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, etc. etc.) is fair game. In fact, most works up to 1922 or so are probably fair game, but then it starts to get complicated.
Yes, you should avoid making your visualizations of the characters look too much like the Disney versions, but don't let them scare you away either.
Also, if you just wanted to show a book on a bookshelf, without actually showing any of the content, you can legitimately show the title of ANY book, even if it's still protected by copyright. Copyright doesn't protect the titles of books, only the content of the story. You might want to avoid book titles that are also big franchise trademarks (Harry Potter, Star Wars, Chicken Soup for the Soul) but even there you'd probably be within your rights to use them. You just don't want to become the test case.
Good luck with your game!
I (not a lawyer) think the correct answer is a little more nuanced. Taking the "Alice in Wonderland" example, the original publication (old edition, paper book) is indeed yours to do whatever you want with. But if you take the xyz publisher's 99'th edition E-Book (or Audio Book, or Book Book), that derivative work can be protected by its own copyright.
So for your example of including a book in a game, if you made your own photo facsimile of an out of copyright edition, you're in the the clear; but if you take advantage of someone else's digitized "Alice" you have to consider what copyright they claim.
I would say that you could, as public domain means that it's free to be used, however I'm not too sure as far as Moral Rights/Authors Rights are concerned.
Wikipedia says that moral rights (sometimes called "authors rights") are rights retained by the author of a work, even if they no longer hold the copyright. They include the right of attribution (or of not being attributed, at the author's discretion), and the right to ensure the integrity of the work although I'm not sure whether that would hinder you inserting the book into your game.
I couldn't say anything about the issue in legal terms, but there's another way to look at it. You could count the amount of effort it has taken to create the work. While you examine the works you see available on the net, good measurement unit is the amount of effort spent to create the work. If you create a game, and half the content is copied from otherwise available public domain work, I would only give you credit of the part that you created yourself. How to determine this relies on the following process (known as effort calculation):
This process allows examining the quality of the work you know is available on the internet. If you include alot of public domain content to your work, then this evaluation process will give bad results for your content, and thus people who look at the quality will determine it to be bad quality. So better not rely on large amounts of work created by someone else.
EDIT: given some comments, I would like to clarify that this process would be useful for understanding how publishers are looking at a products they encounter in the legal environment. This process can detect several issues with the products, including non-original content in the product.
