Quote:
Originally Posted by bobcdy
Would that really seriously hinder reprinting books as ebooks because the cost of the reprinting and maintaining availability is so low compared to print books?
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I wasn't saying that the price of the royalty would hinder. The royalty price would often be zero because of not earning back the advance! The cost is in keeping track of whether royalties are owned at all, and of figuring out who currently owns the rights. Suppose it was the author, except she died intestate and had seven children. Now some of them are deceased, with and without wills. We are talking about serious recordkeeping costs.
Then, once in a while, there would be the cost of defending lawsuits in cases where ownership of the rights was in dispute.
Here's a prediction: The vast majority of today's eBooks would, in, oh, say, the 2070's, sell less than one copy per year. Maybe this would be true of 99.99% of today's titles! And from that revenue you would have to pay a boatload of lawyers and paralegals and software maintainers. I don't think it would be worth it for Amazon's successors, so they will, long before copyright expires, stop distributing the vast majority of eBooks published in this decade.
If copyright law stays unchanged, some of you young whippersnappers here will one day find out whether I'm right.