How Copyright Made Mid-Century Books Vanish

[K. Molen]

The Atlantic has a pretty interesting article regarding the effect of copyright on the availability of books. Below are the opening couple of paragraphs, and I've also attached the graph she mentions.

I recommend reading the article in full, which is available here: http://www.theatlantic.com/technolog...vanish/278209/

Originally Posted by Rebecca J. Rosen of The Atlantic

A book published during the presidency of Chester A. Arthur has a greater chance of being in print today than one published during the time of Reagan.

Last year I wrote about some very interesting research being done by Paul J. Heald at the University of Illinois, based on software that crawled Amazon for a random selection of books. At the time, his results were only preliminary, but they were nevertheless startling: There were as many books available from the 1910s as there were from the 2000s. The number of books from the 1850s was double the number available from the 1950s. Why? Copyright protections (which cover titles published in 1923 and after) had squashed the market for books from the middle of the 20th century, keeping those titles off shelves and out of the hands of the reading public.

Heald has now finalized his research and the picture, though more detailed, is largely the same: "Copyright correlates significantly with the disappearance of works rather than with their availability," Heald writes. "Shortly after works are created and proprietized, they tend to disappear from public view only to reappear in significantly increased numbers when they fall into the public domain and lose their owners."

The graph above shows the simplest interpretation of the data...

[image: Flickr]

[K. Molen]

Hopefully the rise of e-books will be able to combat this trend, since it costs almost nothing to keep an e-book "in print" forever. It should at least revert it almost entirely when it comes to books published today. It remains to be seen how much of a difference it'll make with obscure works from a couple of decades ago.

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by K. Molen

Hopefully the rise of e-books will be able to combat this trend, since it costs almost nothing to keep an e-book "in print" forever. It should at least revert it almost entirely when it comes to books published today. It remains to be seen how much of a difference it'll make with obscure works from a couple of decades ago.

Or even less obscure works from a couple of decades ago. In short, all those books that are now not in ebook format because the publisher/writer/foundation/somebody doesn't want it in ebook format.

[frahse]

I hope publishing "old" works "on demand" is successful, but there are still potential licensing problems.

[WillAdams]

It wouldn't be so bad, if publishers were more willing to negotiate rights promptly and in good faith --- I'm trying to get an out of print book back in print --- was promised an answer by the end of last week, will wait until after next, then see why I haven't got a hard figure from them.

[Antoinekamel]

Sooo interesting study!

[pstjmack]

Already posted an article about this in early July on TeleRead:

http://www.teleread.com/copy-right/c...s-study-finds/

[antithesis]

> seem unwilling to sell their books on Amazon for more than a few years after their initial publication.

But why? Doesn't it mean more money for them?

[K. Molen]

Originally Posted by antithesis

> seem unwilling to sell their books on Amazon for more than a few years after their initial publication.

But why? Doesn't it mean more money for them?

There's a cost involved with keeping books in print, or even running a print-on-demand service, and I guess publishers have made the judgment call that those costs outweigh the earnings when it comes to many older books. Those costs are very nearly eliminated when we're talking ebooks though, hence my hope/assumption that books published as ebooks will never cease to be available.

And even if publishers were to pull them for whatever misguided reason, there's always the black market. And possibly libraries, although I'm not sure how that works...

Does anyone have any insight into whether a library can continue to offer an ebook if a publisher decides to no longer keep it available for purchase?

Common sense seems to dictate that yes, indeed they can still lend "out-of-print" ebooks if they acquired them prior to them going "out-of-print," but common sense and publishers are sometimes at odds with each other.

[Katsunami]

It seems logical, at least in my way of thinking.

Many books from before 1920 or so that are still read, are classics. The mediocre and crap stuff from that time has largely disappeared, as nobody remembers it. Printing books cost money, and having to pay royalties to authors makes books more expensive.

The result is that the books of before 1920 will be guaranteed to sell (classics), and they are cheaper to print than books that still have copyright (no royalties).

The new books, after 2000 and later, are still new. They sell because of that. So if you print and sell mostly the best sellers, then you can ask more money, offsetting the royalties. These books make the bulk of the money, I think.

The books in between have two problems:
a. Only very few books have already attained the "Classic" status.
b. They still require royalties to be paid.

Therefore, it's not certain that reprinting will generate any sales (except for the exception that's already a classic), and they are more expensive to produce than the older books because of the royalties. Therefore, these books won't be printed or converted into ebooks, until they lose their copyright and become cheaper and some of them become classics.

I may be wrong, but for me, it seems logical.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by K. Molen

Does anyone have any insight into whether a library can continue to offer an ebook if a publisher decides to no longer keep it available for purchase?

Common sense seems to dictate that yes, indeed they can still lend "out-of-print" ebooks if they acquired them prior to them going "out-of-print," but common sense and publishers are sometimes at odds with each other.

In the Netherlands, it was possible; at least, the last time I was in a library. I've seen many books there that I *knew* to be out of print because I had tried to purchase them myself.

15 years ago, when I started to read Fantasy, I hit a snag in one of the series published by Spectrum. I couldn't buy the latest books, as they decided not to translate and publish them, and they took the older books out of print even before I could acquire them. The library still had those books, however.

It was the point at which I sold / gave away all of my translated works and started to read English exclusively, except if the original work was in Dutch or German.

[K. Molen]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

In the Netherlands, it was possible; at least, the last time I was in a library. I've seen many books there that I *knew* to be out of print because I had tried to purchase them myself...

From what you're saying I think you're talking about print books? In which case, yeah, for sure libraries still offer print books that are out-of-print. I was talking about ebooks.

Since ebooks are a bit of a different beast with licensing being involved and some publishers wanting to use a different charging scheme for ebooks than paper books, I was wondering if perhaps a publisher deciding to pull an ebook from sale would also mean that libraries could no longer lend them.

Or did I misunderstand your post and you were indeed referring to ebooks?

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by K. Molen

From what you're saying I think you're talking about print books? In which case, yeah, for sure libraries still offer print books that are out-of-print. I was talking about ebooks.

Since ebooks are a bit of a different beast with licensing being involved and some publishers wanting to use a different charging scheme for ebooks than paper books, I was wondering if perhaps a publisher deciding to pull an ebook from sale would also mean that libraries could no longer lend them.

Or did I misunderstand your post and you were indeed referring to ebooks?

No, I was referring to print books. As of yet, there are no libraries in The Netherlands that lend eBooks. They only provide Project Gutenberg downloads of Dutch classics.

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

It seems logical, at least in my way of thinking.

Many books from before 1920 or so that are still read, are classics. The mediocre and crap stuff from that time has largely disappeared, as nobody remembers it. Printing books cost money, and having to pay royalties to authors makes books more expensive.

The result is that the books of before 1920 will be guaranteed to sell (classics), and they are cheaper to print than books that still have copyright (no royalties).

The new books, after 2000 and later, are still new. They sell because of that. So if you print and sell mostly the best sellers, then you can ask more money, offsetting the royalties. These books make the bulk of the money, I think.

The books in between have two problems:
a. Only very few books have already attained the "Classic" status.
b. They still require royalties to be paid.

Therefore, it's not certain that reprinting will generate any sales (except for the exception that's already a classic), and they are more expensive to produce than the older books because of the royalties. Therefore, these books won't be printed or converted into ebooks, until they lose their copyright and become cheaper and some of them become classics.

I may be wrong, but for me, it seems logical.

May I respectfully disagree on one point?
There are many "classics" written after 1923. Hemmingway, Faulkner, Chandler, Steinbeck, are among the authors that would be considered "classics".

[Katsunami]

Of course there are many classics written after 1923, and I'm quite sure they're still in production, apart from maybe a very few, for some exceptional reason. I do think however, that the amount of classics is much smaller than all the classics from 1923 and before combined.

Thus, there would be more books available that are written before 1923 as compared to books written after 1923, as most non-classics from both times are out of production.