Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
According to the review, he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1933. That book should be in the PD, shouldn't it? No, I guess, they renewed the copyright, which would mean 95 years after it was published. Yes, specialty books like that are my pet bugaboo with regards to ebooks. Kind of odd that it's no longer in print. Perhaps it's an orphaned work, or the copyright holder (the author died in 1971) isn't all that interested.
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It's not odd for non-fiction.
Of course, there also are a lot of well-reviewed out of print fiction titles among those 25 million books. But, at least with fiction, a few of the best titles, for each year, are eBooks. When the post-1922 the prize winner is fiction, it is usually in print, and, except for the least known authors, is also an eBook. Here are lesser-known fiction Pulitzer Prize fiction examples:
https://www.amazon.com/Honey-Horn-No...ey+in+the+horn
https://www.amazon.com/Early-Autumn-...=UTF8&qid=&sr=
What I can't get, except via interlibrary loan, is most of the prize-winning non-fiction.
My well-known non-fiction example author, Alan Nevins, has a few titles still in print, such as this next one, so his estate must be reachable:
https://www.amazon.com/Fr%C3%A9mont-...2991352&sr=1-8
As for copyright renewal, as alluded to in the OP article, verifying that copyright was renewed
often might not be that hard, but being absolutely certain a title was NOT renewed is difficult due to possibilities such as title variations. I'm guessing this is why is is often
claimed that most books, back when renewal was needed, didn't get renewed, and yet you won't see these titles at
www.gutenberg.org, or in the Patricia Clark Library. Someone who knows more can correct me, but I'm thinking that the risk of having to pay the litigation cost and fine for even a single US 1923-1963 title, for which the renewal was accidentally missed, is so high that no one can risk it.
In theory, someone could start a business offering copyright title insurance for books published in the US 1923-1963, comparable to the title insurance against missed liens purchased when buying a home. In practice, since no one is selling that insurance, it must be financially infeasible. So, as explained in the OP link, Google proposed to compensate the authors and estates regardless of renewal.
And, just to remind people, Google would have allowed authors and estates to charge, for the eBooks, whatever they wanted up to $29.99, of which the rights-holder would get $18.89 (63 percent). It is only the titles where no rights-holder came forward (or where the rights holder was content with the Google recommendation) where Google would set the price, 63 percent of which would go to the Books Rights Registry.
This all seems to me a little like the accepted ASCAP music royalty scheme.