Not sure if those numbers are accurate, or even how anyone would have
been able to come up with them, but that proportion actually looks
high to my eyes.
I did an experiment a while back involving books by authors who died
in 1950. My sample size wasn't huge, but I did try to (a) include as
many non-famous as well as famous authors who died that year, and (b)
track down the title of every full-fledged book that they had
published, in Canada, the UK, or the US. Then I tracked down every
discrete edition I could find, including translations, adaptations,
and video adaptations, as well as, in a separate category, "special
editions", into which I lumped the PG editions of works that are
cropping up in library catalogs, and audio or digital books prepared
most likely under exemptions for the blind and visually impaired.
In 1950 — the year in which the authors in question died — 12% of
their collected works were still in "print" (i.e., available in all
editions but "special", supra), or would be in print again at some
time in the next fifty years.
By 2000, the last year these works are in copyright in the life+50
universe, which is, propaganda notwithstand, most of Earth, that
figure was 1.2%.
After I enlarged my sample, the proportions didn't change that much,
so I think the Law of Large Numbers is at work.
I haven't yet constructed a model that accounts for works going out
of, and then coming back into print; this model assumes that if a work
was in print in 1994, it was also in print in every year going back to
first publication.
Given that there was a HUGE explosion of publishing in the second half
of the 20th century, at least in Canada, and I'd be willing to bet in
most of the developed world as well, if not the under-developed too,
and that few of those works have enjoyed more than one edition, the
1/16 ratio of in-print©righted to all-ever-published©righted,
is probably an over-estimate.
I'd like to keep doing some research on this front, but I'm not sure I
have time. It is, however, something that could probably be done in a
distributed fashion. Anyone who's interested, talk to me.
----- Original Message -----
>From Michael Hart <hart(a)pglaf.org>
Date Mon, 4 Sep 2006 09:03:16 -0700 (PDT)
To The gutvol-d Mailing List <gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org>
Subject [gutvol-d] I received this statistic a while back,
that only 2 million of 32 million books
under copyright are actually in print.
Does anyone know the source?
Thanks!!!
