Can I make money from my youtube videos doing this?

A book review is original material, and you are allowed to use original material. Many reviewers will quote the book, and they are allowed to use small chunks of the book at a time. However, if you just read the whole chapter verbatim, that is not allowed because there is no original material.

Read the guidelines; YouTube will tell you that your videos are eligible even when they’re not. I was asked to monetize a video that contains blatant copyrighted material, so you can’t trust it.

I don’t know the answer to your question, but YouTube has pretty clear FAQs on what is allowed and what isn’t.

You can do book reviews. That is legal. Can you make a lot of money? I don’t think so.

@marinelife Okay, cool. I wasn’t aiming to make a lot of money. I already have a job. But I always thought it’d be cool to just make some petty cash with it. And the alcoholic beverages are okay too?

@ScottyMcGeester Welcome to Fluther. It’s absurd to claim you can’t get paid to write book or music reviews. I held the job writing music reviews for the LS Star once upon a time. Just about every newspaper and magazine has a reviewer or two on the payroll, and they buy reviews from freelancers.

Drunken book reviews sounds cool enough to me. I might pay to watch that. And I’m pretty sure there’s some drinking going on here. That said, I have no idea how much you can earn on YouTube. Depends on how viral the stuff you produce gets. Good luck. And let us know when your channel goes live.

@marinelife Actually you can make a surprising amount of money off of youtube. Some larger channels posting nothing but video games and commentary make upwards of $200,000 a year.

I say go for it, OP. The worst that can happen is you can get hit with a copyright issue, but that happens so often on youtube anyway I don’t think anyone will bat an eye.

Your fellow YouTuber, like the vast majority of people, does not understand copyright law. There is a pervasive myth out there that you can do whatever you want with copyrighted material so long as you make no money off of it, and that you cannot do anything at all with copyrighted material if you do make money off of it. Neither of these things is true. There are severe restrictions on how much copyrighted material can be reproduced regardless of whether or not you are profiting off of the reproduction, but no one can stop you from talking about copyrighted material for money. If your fellow YouTuber were correct, Roger Ebert would be bankrupt and facing life in prison by now.

@ETpro Oh, it’s actually already up! It’s been up for a while, just that one of my “friends” then told me I couldn’t monetize because I was talking about copyrighted material. Here it is: http://www.youtube.com/user/MisterDapper1/videos

I was just thinking after what my friend told me that I had to make yet another channel without talking about books or video games.