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by TheBurningOr
4699 days ago
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FWIW The Atlantic covered this story much better (http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/the-ho...) and their coverage included two additional charts. One corresponds to your criticism of adjusting for titles vs versions. In that chart, the drop off in the mid 20th century is still evident but not as extreme. In the second chart, they account for differences in the number of books published per decade using third party sources. In that version, the divergance is actually much worse. I don't think there were any responses to your criticism of the categories. |
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On the "adjusted" chart you reference, my thought was the adjustment makes that chart not hugely useful to the copyright debate. In other words, the debate has one side people who say "copyright encourages creative output" and on the other people who say "copyright actually limits the spread of creative output." By showing books available as a percentage of total books published, rather than showing absolute output, the adjusted chart is useless for the question "might strong copyright encourage greater output," instead measuring only the answer to the question "does copyright tend to limit distribution." Both sides in the debate agree the answer to the latter question is "yes." They do disagree on the scope of the problem so I suppose the adjusted chart addresses that point but it seems like a minor and muddled bit of data. You look at it and might think "ah copyright is really holding down the distribution of media" but when you realize it's basically a percentage chart (based on a small and not necessarily representative sample) and then realize book output has hugely grown it's hard to see the differences in the chart as particularly consequential for the debate. At least IMHO.
I would like to see that same chart adjusted for population growth.