[mminer237]

I'm not your lawyer, but if the text is public domain, you can do whatever you want with it. You should be able to walk into a book store, take a photo of every page of Sherlock Holmes, post it on Facebook, and be good legally. You can legally download scans of Jane Austen novels published by Penguin last year.

A publisher would only have a copyrightable claim in their original creative works. So the cover art, the foreword, etc. This would also include e-books, as the specific code for that would be copyrightable illegal to download. Only the words themselves would be free, so you would need someone to create a gratis file therefrom for you.