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Regardless of the length of copyright, there's no income stream for anyone if the work goes out of print.
A book that's out of print doesn't benefit the author, the author's heirs, or the public at large. To continue with the "house" analogy, it's like a perfectly good house that's sitting empty and useless.
Suppose you have an author who starts writing in his or her thirties and lives to age ninety. Those early books wouldn't become public domain until about 125 years after they were written.
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