Copyrights and the audience

Here is an odd observation, I know. Just something to think about.

With the advent of eReaders like the Kindle and the Sony Reader, there has been an explosion in the consumption of so-called "classic" novels. Why? Copyright law.

Novels published before 1923 are in the public domain and can be freely published. Hence, all kinds of people — amateurs and commercial publishers alike — are cranking them out with enthusiastic volume. Gutenberg.org has 30,000 free books available on their website. Feedbooks and MobileRead have thousands. Manybooks.net has over 25,000. All free, all public domain. Neat.

But, here is an interesting observation. There are some authors whose career spans the 1923 dividing line — W. Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh, PG Wodehouse, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Edna Ferber just to name a few of my favorites. Work they published before 1923 can be had for free. Work after 1923 is still protected by copyright and is only available for sale.

Guess which books are being read most? Guess which books are developing the widest audience? Guess which books live and which are relatively mothballed?

Consider Maugham. If you want to read Of Human Bondage, Liza of Lambeth, The Moon and Sixpence, or The Magician you can do so immediately, without paying for them. However, if you want to read The Razor's Edge (one of his very best, IMHO) you'll have to buy it. Same with The Painted Veil, Secret Agent, Cakes and Ale, The Writer's Notebook, and all his later, often better works and all of his wonderful short stories.

Setting aside issues of money and his right to earn it (which I support), there is an interesting issue here about the independent life of the artwork and the writer's relationship with the audience. Without being read, without an audience, a novel (or a book of photography) is a dead collection of molecules and ideas. How does the copyright law serve the needs of the artwork? It unquestionably serves the needs of the publisher, author, and their heirs, but seems to me it gets in the way of the artwork itself.

I recently discovered the writer Evelyn Waugh. Brideshead Revisited is a fascinating book on so many levels. I wanted to read more. As it turns out, most of his work is post-1923. Another is PG Wodehouse. How can you not like Jeeves and Wooster? Again, most of his work is post-1923. So, naturally enough, I've been reading their early works first because I have access to them for free. I'm buying their books as I have time for them, one at a time. I may get to them. I may have so much at my disposal from the public domain corpus that I won't. I wonder how the writers would feel about this? Would they be more pleased that their finances post-1923 are protected, or that their earlier work is being read?

There is a metaphorical giant hole in literature after 1923 and before the contemporary lot. Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Tom Clancy and the like need not worry. They are hot, contemporary authors whose work flies off the bookstore shelves — and into the new digital readers, too. Dickens, Austen, Dumas, and Twain need not worry either. Their work lives vibrantly in the public domain.

But, Earle Stanley Gardner? Graham Greene? HP Lovecraft? James Thurber? Erskine Caldwell? Dorothy Parker? Virginia Woolf? Is the audience for their work still alive and well? Perhaps, but I can't help but wonder if the audience for their work is suppressed because of the copyright laws. We remember them — and even read them — but do we do so as much as their work deserves? I wonder.

There is always the public library, I know, but lots of books I'd like to read are no longer available. There is only so much room on the shelves. I love to see these books available for digital borrowing, but we're too early in the technology for it to have penetrated the library system very far. Someday . . . but in the meantime, we're left to acquire books for our personal use either for free from the public domain or for sale by commercial publishers.

Of course, just because a book is free doesn't mean it will be widely read. Long lost authors like Irvin S. Cobb, George Barton, Robert Ames Bennet, and Arthur Train can attest to this. Conversely, a few authors from the 1930s are still widely read — like JRR Tolkein, Margaret Mitchell, John Steinbeck, and Aldous Huxley come to mind. The 1923 copyright barrier is thankfully quite porous. Work of the highest quality will always find an audience.

I'm not an anti-protection nut. As an author and publisher, I believe in and support copyrights as ardently as anyone. Nonetheless, I do think it has a dampening effect on the widest-spread distribution of artwork. I see no better solution than the current copyright paradigm, but I do also see its deleterious effects on some works of art.

Comments

[Thomas Paris]

There's another point you haven't touched upon and that's orphan works. There are creations out there, whose author is unknown but which are not in the public domain yet. Because they're not, we can't make new copies of them. So what happens if all the copies currently available come to disappear?

I realize this topic has been used by greedy corporations to promote laws that would make it easier for them to "steal"works. But just because recent attempts at addressing this issue have been ill-guided doesn't mean nothing should be done.

Another question I'm most interested in is the actual purpose of copyright. Historically its goal was to promote creation and the mean was through monetary compensation for the author. To ensure authors would/could create, the law created a kind of contract between them and society: they would be granted a monopoly for a limited time after which their creation becomes property of society as a whole (public domain). Nowadays, it seems monetary compensation has become the goal and continuous extension of the duration of copyright is making it look more and more like a permanent monopoly. Now, I'm not saying this is right or wrong (though my wording probably makes my opinion fairly clear) but we should at least ask ourselves whether this really is what we want.

Brooks, I believe your worries about the dampening effect of copyright have everything to do with this question.