Re: copyright expiration as a spur to creativity

On Tue, 8 Sep 1998, Albert Henderson <noblestation[_at_]compuserve.com> wrote:
>
> The emergence of photocopying as the linchpin of resource sharing
> has interfered with dissemination in the following way. The numbers
> of copies printed of most academic books has been declining. If you
> want to know about "scarce" ask Michael Scarpetti elsewhere on this
> thread about finding a used copy of the book he wants. Analyses of
> 70 large university libraries indicates they have been acquiring fewer
> and fewer titles -- a shrinking fraction of what's published. The
> Thor Decision, which compelled destruction of publishers' inventories,
> was the coup de grace.

I do not think that photocopiers are responsible for the scarcity of many books. Being a consumer of books for many years, I believe that the reason for scarcity of many books is that there are so many books in our society. Does anyone know how many books, magazines, journals, and newspapers we have now in the U.S.? The publishers see that our society is oversaturated with so many books, magazines, journals, and newspapers and they use polls, statistics, and any other figures to determine the reasonable number of copies they should produce for each publication. Therefore, the more books there are in the society, the less number of copies there will be for new books. Why should a publisher produce 1,000,000 copies of a chess book while there are 100 different chess books available in the market? No, they will produce just 10,000 copies and see how the market responds to the brand new chess book.

> The law, then, is failing. The expansion of "fair use" has
> encouraged a reduction in library growth, for instance, and
> the decimation of university library collections: a major source of
> dissemination. Scientists who once read (and copied from) circulating
> "duplicate" subscriptions now must resort to databases and cites from
> published sources to order copies of articles. Not surprisingly,
> foreign sources have emerged to supply hundreds of thousands of
> copies to U.S. researchers.

For many people, library is now a center for entertainment. It is no longer seen as a preserver of old and new knowledge. So, the libraries have to compete with other forms of entertainment for the attention from the population. There is a book titled "Civilization of Illiteracy" by Mihai Nadin. I have not read the book but if we are in the direction of becoming more illiterate in the future, it is no wonder that libraries will become smaller or extinct.

In summary, photocopier and fair use has nothing to do with the scarcity of many books. It is the market.

Joseph Pietro Riolo
<riolo[_at_]voicenet.com> Received on Thu Sep 10 1998 - 22:55:14 GMT