The Hole in Our Collective Memory: How Copyright Made Mid-Century Books Vanish /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. / Rebecca J. Rosen <http://www.theatlantic.com/rebecca-rosen/> Jul 30 2013, 1:35 PM ET Last year I wrote about some very interesting research <http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/the-missing-20th-centu...> 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 <http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2290181> 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. It reveals, shockingly, that there are substantially more new editions available of books from the 1910s than from the 2000s. Editions of books that fall under copyright are available in about the same quantities as those from the first half of the 19th century. Publishers are simply not publishing copyrighted titles unless they are very recent. [...] Continua qui: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/the-hole-in-our-collec...