"The above chart shows a distribution of 2500 newly printed fiction books selected at random from Amazon's warehouses. What's so crazy is that there are just as many from the last decade as from the decade between 1910 and 1920. Why? Because beginning in 1923, most titles are copyrighted. Books from before 1923 tend to be in the public domain, and the result is that Amazon carries them — lots of them. The chart comes from University of Illinois law professor Paul Heald."

Tim O’Reilly originally shared this post:

This is the most amazing graph that demonstrates what our wrong-headed copyright regime has done to suppress rather than encourage economic activity!

If only our policy makers were driven by data rather than lobbying by copyright interests!

The Missing 20th Century: How Copyright Protection Makes Books Vanish

Because of the strange distortions of copyright protection, there are twice as many newly published books available on Amazon from 1850 as there are from 1950