Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
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.
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I'm not saying people shouldn't say new things. Of course we want new ideas and new books. But we can be happy with a lot fewer than today.
I just googled to find out how many new books there were in 2018 and I found two numbers, one for self published books, which is said to be over a million, although it doesn't say if that's worldwide or in the USA, and another that says 304,912 distinct books were published in the USA. I don't know if that includes self-published books. So the numbers are iffy but close enough to re-enforce my point that we can do with fewer books.
If we were to do away with copyright that wouldn't mean no more books. It might mean a lot fewer books but those would be from the authors who most love to write and I don't really see that as a bad thing.
I'm not sure I'm really advocating that we end copyright. Books are important to me and that would be a risky move with no more information than I have. But I think it's worth some discussion.
As for the next Harry Potter, or substitute your favorite blockbuster, that's not really something I care about. How many people other than publishers and authors do care about it? The Harry Potter fans have their books and they don't really have any reason to think they wouldn't have them if there were no copyrights. Maybe they wouldn't. Maybe they would. That's not really part of this.
Barry