Quote:
Originally Posted by Xanthe
Not necessarily. A lot of 20th century science fiction, romance and mystery genres were only available in paperback format for decades, and were not printed on archival paper. Once those copies disintegrate, those books will be gone.
I've got a lot of books for which there is no hard cover equivalent, and the authors are either dead or not published any longer. There is no need for their works to be lost to time.
And it's not an issue of whether you or I gain something unique from a book, it's the uniqueness of each book in and of itself. There's no longer any reason to have to cull knowledge, fiction or non-fiction; the technology is there to preserve it now so that future users can pick and choose as they will, not as we dictate by what we keep and what we discard.
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My argument has never been against preserving the books, Google or otherwise. I lean towards the opinion that the copyright holder should make that decision, but as the issue has been decided for the time being by the courts then the books themselves are most likely being preserved. If not we can blame Google
My argument(s) were that the knowledge contained in these books is/was rarely unique although it may in some instances have been presented in a unique way that was never imitated and I admit that there could have been a few published books containing world changing knowledge that no one has read and picked up on or saved or preserved in any way that are still in copyright although it seems unlikely. A friend of mine has kept every Harlequin she ever read and she is 90+ and they are in pretty good shape. Pulp fiction is collected by many and a lot if not all of the Penny Dreadfuls from the mid 18th century are still in existence, cheap paper, crappy ink and all. Then there are the comic books and playboy magazines that are still supposedly in mint condition from the mid 19th century and prior.
My other argument was that publishers/authors/rights holders should not be forced to publish a book as some seem to think or even make it available. Perhaps if they are not interested in publishing it, it should fall into the public domain sooner, perhaps not. Not my decision to make. They have a right to pursue their business interests as they see fit, just like McDonalds or Safeway etc. Kind of an inviolate right IMO. Just as you have the right to not scan/OCR and distribute the books that you own a copy of that are no longer in copyright.
And IMO publishers are doing a reasonable job of making backlist and older books available in both paper and electronic format and the quality is improving.
Again, in my opinion, books go out of print because not enough people are interested in buying them. Rex Stout (whom I mentioned in a previous post) has never gone out of print. Nor has Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers or Dorothy Allingham to name a few mid century or earlier authors. Looking at the odd romance author (Barbara Cartland, Mary Burchell) I remember from the 50's/60's it seems that they are either being reissued as ebooks or are for sale as used books and I am pretty sure Georgette Heyer has never been unavailable.
Subjectively I feel that my world would be poorer if I had never read some of these books, but objectively I doubt it. There are so many books I enjoy and more being published or republished all the time.
We can all give examples of books we have read that are not currently in print, and examples of books that cost more than we want to pay in terms of money or convenience that we would like to read, but I have yet to see a few hundred or even one concrete example of a book printed in the last century that is certifiably not in existence and I have asked
. I am sure there are some, but I feel that the number is not high enough to impact society as we know it.
Helen