Quote:
Originally Posted by Lynx-lynx
DarkScribe my life and general philosophy has benefited enormously by reading out of copyright books.
Had Project Gutenberg and other sources not had copies of out of copyright authors and titles my life would be far less enriched.
In some cases I didn't know of the author and in other cases I hadn't bothered to either read them or borrow them (if that was possible).
It's only for the mere fact that I could access these books in a clean and font readable format that I did.
For some authors, it was a curiosity factor - 'what was all the fuss over'. For other authors it was the fact that PG and others had deemed them to be suitably 'classic' to keep in the public eye.
I'm also now starting to identify that I might give myself a research project on a particular style and genre of fiction book and part of my decision making is identifying if the material (books) that could fulfil my research were available primarily via e-resources, and how I could obtain a copy.
Copyright rules impact not just the popular authors and titles, but ALL authors and titles, and the 50 year + death ruling that Aus followed until 2005 at least meant that books not in the provenance of any particular publishing house got the opportunity of being re-published and brought back to life, or being available via PG et al, 20 years more quickly than they will since the roll over to the US wishes in 2005.
As to ebook non-fiction author/title access this is still an undervalued arena and not one I hear discussed much on these pages either.
So yes - I take umbrage at you suggesting that 'How many people are really going to rush out and buy huge quantities of very old books if they dropped it back to twenty-eight years? About as many as buy them here - almost no one.'
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Umbrage eh? Ok, take some more. It's free.
You are not the norm, as if you were places like Gutenberg would be providing one hell of a lot more texts - per capita - than they do. I have been working - volunteering - with them for years and am still amazed at how little real interest there is in the huge quantity of great literature that is freely available. Many people when they first get an eReader grab a few free books, but few seem to continue to do so. If any of the "statistics" for pirating books are close to true, far more people pirate books than choose free public domain books. If they are pirating books then they are clearly readers, but as so many ignore great literature for modern - often trashy - alternatives, they are not too discerning. I doubt that the status quo would change very much if copyright was reduced.