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Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
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What? I'm sorry, I genuinely don't understand what there is about this that would be surprising. Books from the 19th century are, pretty much without exception (we all know the Holmes' argument), in the public domain. Thus, zillions of free copies of everything from Pride and Prejudice to Wuthering Heights to the more obscure works (I had fun proofing some silly book on etiquette on DP sometime recently). Of course there are more of those available than those that are still under copyright. Plus, a
lot of books from earlier periods were re-issued--some even set to a press for the first time--in the 19th century, due to technological innovations. This was precisely the time in history that reading, on a large scale, became available to the general public, and publishers raced to put out editions of works that had been written far earlier. I suspect it may have been the largest publishing boom in history until the advent of the KDP.
Plus: this is (pretty much) all based on an Amazon crawl. We all know that there are hundreds of editions of every popular PD book on Amazon, ranging from the ubiquitous Pride and Prejudice (6,266 various versions) to War and Peace and who-knows-what else. The skewing of those numbers is just...you'd need
hundreds of hours of research to de-skew and de-weight those figures. I think the median of "four" copies per PD title is just...not a viable number. That's merely my opinion, but we've all seen the vast numbers of PD titles on Amazon.
Even using the WorldCat graph, it simply shows that books from post-WWI to now are still under copyright, and many of those copyright holders, lost or otherwise, choose not to republish their books. If the copyright holders are known,
they've made that choice themselves. It's not our choice to make. If those copyright holders are unknown, we've already discussed this in my last very long post about the effect of wars, lost records, and the like.
I'm not getting whatever it is you are trying to say, other than, books under copyright aren't freely available. We already know that; I think that's the topic under discussion.
Hitch