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@pglaf.org> Date Mon, 4 Sep 2006 09:03:16 -0700 (PDT) To The gutvol-d Mailing List <gutvol-d@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!!!