I have been asked to read childrens stories at a local event and am
planning to read from the following:

http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/ice/coo/

This text is supposedly in the public domain and is being sold as a
text file with other public domain books on a CD from the above
website.

My question is, is it legal for me to record my readings of the
stories with full credit given to the author and title, then sell my
CD's? If the book is already in the public domain would I not then
only be selling my effort to read it and duplicate it?

Thanks, 

Rob

If it is truly in the public domain, then yes, you may lawfully record
yourself reading the text and sell the CD's.  Please make sure that it
is literally you that makes the recording and not someone else,
because as odd as it sounds the person making the sound recording (the
person operating the device which physically places the sounds down on
the recording media) will own the copyright in the resulting sound
recording (to the extent it is copyrightable--see below).

Are you really sure these works are in the public domain?  That's a
pretty tricky determination sometimes.  Also, remember that if the
works truly are in the public domain, you will have a very difficult
time enforcing a copyright in the recording since you cannot
"resurrect" a copyright in an underlying public domain work by
recording it anew, except to the extent you add new independent
creative content.  Thus, if you sell one CD and that one person copies
it 500 times and sells them, what are you going to do?

My first paragraph assumes that the "recording engineer" is not your
employee.  If he or she is truly an employee, the employer will own
the copyright.  If not an employee, either you yourself needs to do it
or you need to get a written assignment from the recording engineer.

Ipfan is correct. Yes, if it is in the Public Domain, you may
repackage it any way you like, and sell it.

I would be more concerned with confirming and documenting that this
story is, in fact, in the public domain.

This might come in handy:

WHEN U.S. WORKS PASS INTO THE PUBLIC DOMAIN
http://www.unc.edu/~unclng/public-d.htm

~~Cynthia