On books and libraries and copyright

The last of the batch of short news and commentary links I plan to post today.

From DegreeTutor, a discussion of the continuing usefulness of libraries.

From Tim O'Reilly, the useful factlet that only 4% of books published are being monetized, i.e., are under copyright and commercially available from the rightsholder. He estimates that 20% are in the public domain, leaving approximately 75% of all published books in the "twilight zone" of being out of print but still "protected" by copyright law.

This illustrates a couple of key points that I've harped on before. The doctrine of "first sale", which permits secondhand sellers and libraries to distribute physical copies of published materials that have been properly purchased from the intellectual rightsholder, is critically important because it is currently the only means of access to 75% of all published material. And our current regime of perpetually extensible copyright is simply insane, allowing the interests of those who control access to 4% of published material to dictate that another 75% of the world's published material be suppressed indefinitely for their sake.