Instead of just general fiction, let me ramble on for a few minutes about a few niches I'm familiar with. A 28 year copyright term would be releasing the very first volumes in roleplaying games into the public domain. A 14 year copyright term might have some economic effect on the industry, but primarily on companies that bought the rights to reprint old material. (Looking at Dover, one could easily argue that they could stay in buisness.) Pretty much everyone who wants the mainstream material that's 15 years old either has a copy or can find a used copy cheap. The non-mainstream material is, as a general rule, gone. Not because it's bad, but the market is dominated by a few licenses and a few more-or-less generic games. The games where you roleplay crawfish in a post-apocalyptic future weren't bad, they were just odd. They're part of the long tail, as mentioned in the Wired article someone pointed out, hurt further by the fact the whole industry is part of the long-tail; big industry players consider 10,000 books to be a large print run. Twenty-eight years in the computer industry would hurt about 10 books. Andrew Tannenbaum and Donald Knuth would have to worry about people updating older editions and competing with them. Fortunately for them, the universities that employ them don't plan to stop paying them anytime soon. In exchange for slighly hurting those two dignitaries economically, we have access without question to a wealth of information about early computers and the early history of the industry, little of which is in print and equally little of which is available to the average programmer. But don't worry: all the precious books of BASIC programs for the Commodore 64 will still be under copyright for a long time to come.
Don't deprive millions of readers for the sake of a relatively small number who want to read poor quality older books. The really good stuff, the stuff people are actually interested in reading, tends to stay in print.
There's large volumes of niche material that is high quality and interesting, but is out of print because of the relatively small market. Even some highly lauded material, like the Lensman series, spent long periods of time out of print. Not everyone wants to read Stephen King or the other authors of the day, and not everything falls into the mass-market paperback category. -- ___________________________________________________________ Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm