3 ms·
Note that the graph in this article is confusingly titled. From the paper itself, it is clear that "New Editions from Amazon by Decade" should read "Randomly S
by codex 13y ago
Note that the graph in this article is confusingly titled. From the paper itself, it is clear that "New Editions from Amazon by Decade" should read "Randomly Selected Editions of Books Available in New Condition from Amazon by Decade." In other words, they didn't simply look at newly-released prints. From the paper:
"The 2317 random editions of new books available on Amazon during the fall of 2012 are charted in Figure 1 below by the decade of the original publication date of the corresponding
title. Both fiction and non-fiction editions are included. Editions of books now in the public domain (those published prior to 1923) constitute 72% of the total (1665/2317), while editions of titles still under copyright constitute 28% (652/2317).
The high percentage of public domain editions is probably driven by two factors. First, public domain books typically have more publishers and more editions per title, since there is no copyright owner to restrain exploitation. Second, Amazon offers as “in stock” multiple new editions of public domain books sold by a growing group of print-on-demand publishers that take advantage of the recent digitization of many old titles."
- jrochkind1 13y agoRead past the first screen, and you'll see they acknowledge that and try to account for it in a series of additional normalized graphs later on.
- codex 13y agoIn the paper it is acknowledged, but not in the article; even the author of the article is confused, for they write: "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." This summary is incorrect. Were it correct, the entire paper would be silly, because of course you're going to have more new editions of older books than new editions of newer books: the newer books need fewer reprints or reasons to have new editions.
- jrochkind1 13y agoI don't understand why you say the article did not acknowledge it. From the article that's linked here: > But this isn't a totally honest portrait of how many different books are available, because for books that are in the public domain, often many different editions exist, and the random sample is likely to overrepresent them. "After all," Heald explains, "if one feeds a random ISBN number [into] Amazon, one is more likely to retrieve Milton's Paradise Lost (with 401 editions and 401 ISBN numbers) than Lorimer's A Wife out of Egypt (1 edition and 1 ISBN)." He found that on average the public domain titles had a median of four editions per title. (The mean was 16, but highly distorted by the presence of a small number of books with hundreds of editions. For this reason, statisticians whom Heald consulted recommended using the median.) Heald divided the number of public-domain editions by four, providing a graph that compares the number of titles available. Then, yet another chart, that tries to normalize by percentage of books published in that decade still available.... > But even this chart may understate the effects of copyright, since the comparison assumes that the same quantity of books has been published every decade...Heald and his assistants were able to arrive at a pretty good approximation by relying on the number of titles available for each year in WorldCat, a library catalog that contains the complete listings of 72,000 libraries around the world. He then normalized his graph to the decade of the 1990s, which saw the greatest number of titles published.
- codex 13y agoThe issue is simply: do they count "editions" or "new editions"--that is, editions which were only recently released? It follows that older books would have more "new editions" than newer books.