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Old 01-04-2011, 09:18 PM   #62
SteveEisenberg
Grand Sorcerer
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Join Date: Jun 2008
Location: near Philadelphia USA
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga View Post
Nice theory, but the reality is that most of Europe was already at life + 70 before the US. The US was in part catching up.
But it still is shameful.

Most books I want to read are works published in the twentieth century, under copyright, and not in print, much less in a Kindle edition.

If you look at the winners of the Pulitizer Prizes for novels, biography, and history, you will see that, without exception I can find, all are available as eBooks if in the US public domain. And most not in the public domain are unavailable except in libraries or as used books. I've seen posters in other threads here claim that most of this stuff is on the darknet, but this is just not true.

To give an example, look at the works of Conrad Richter (1890-1968). Only around half his stuff is in print, and there is nothing for the Kindle except, strangely, one six page short story. If he ever goes public domain, Project Gutenberg or successor will likely get out everything, and have it carefully proofread by multiple volunteers checking each other's work.

Another example is John P. Marquand (1893-1960) -- all that is available for the Kindle, at Amazon.com, is his one public domain book. (Free from Amazon.com, yes, but this makes the point that copyright is not working to get us access to books.)

If we were to look at the work of authors from the 1930's-1960's who were runners-up up to the big prizes, we would find even less.

Is this going to change soon? I doubt it. They still haven't made some of the more recent stuff available on the Kindle (for example, 2002 Pulitzer Prize fiction winner Empire Falls), so it will be a long, long time, if ever, before they get to your average well-reviewed biography published in the 1960's.

I'm not anti-capitalism, but capitalism is so obviously failing to get us access to all except current books and classics that I am amazed e-reading people are defending this system.

The long copyrights are there to protect stuff like movies and bestsellers, with the vast majority of books languishing. For the sake of a handful of books that will still be in print 50-70 years after the author's death, and, yes, Mickey Mouse, millions of books are unavailable.

Last edited by SteveEisenberg; 01-04-2011 at 09:29 PM.
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