Quote:
Originally Posted by barryem
I've been thinking about this thread some. I think we've hashed and rehashed whether copyright should be perpetual enough that there's not much else to say. So I've been thinking of it in terms of something I said earlier. Copyright is more to benefit society as a whole than it is to benefit any individuals within that society. But does it really benefit society anymore?
It used to. We wanted books to read and we wanted to encourage creative people to write them and copyright does that.
Now we have so many books already and so many more published each year that I wonder why we want to encourage it anymore. Maybe if we stopped copyright only the people who loved to write would publish books and those hoping to make a living from it would find other ways.
We'd probably still have more new books every year than we could possibly read, at least I think we would. And maybe more people would start reading more older books. I'm a little biased here because I happen to like older books. But still it's a valid question: how many new books do we really need every year?
In Sartre's "Nausia" there was a character referred to as The Self Taught Man who spent most of his time in the library determined to read every book in the library from A to Z. However, several years into it, when he's just begun books whose authors begin with B, he finds that he has to go back and read the new books with authors beginning with A that were written after he read past that point. Little by little the other characters realize he'll never be able to finish.
Today we'd never get past authors beginning with Ab. 
Barry |
I think the flaw in your thinking is that you seem to assume everyone likes the same thing. Certainly, we get a lot more books published every year than any one person can read, but different people like different books. Who knows what book will be the next Harry Potter? I'm sure that most publishers wishes they could tell.
For the most part, individual imprints tend to put out the same number of books as before, it's just there are a lot more imprints. Plus, we now have independent authors and backlist books, all available for purchase. This wasn't really possible when you were limited to what a book shop had on it's shelves.
One of the wonderful things about the human imagination is how diverse it is. Just when you think that everything worth saying has been said, someone comes up with something new.