One of the interesting paradoxes of copyright law is that although copyright protections are supposed to incentivize the creation and distribution of “useful” works, when copyright owners decide to stop publishing a work, no one else can keep the book in publication without risking a copyright infringement suit. This makes the freedom to buy and sell used books incredibly important in contexts in which the audience for a particular work may be somewhat small and specialized. Blogger Laurelin in the Rain made this point with respect to works of feminist theory, writing:
Woman Hating [by Andrea Dworkin] is notoriously difficult to find anywhere, and none of Dworkin’s works have been reprinted for some time, a form of silencing which contributes to the widespread misinformation about both Andrea and her work. She herself, in fact, wrote about how women’s writing often gets ignored, how feminist works are forgotten, doomed to oblivion by the refusal of publishing houses to reprint. Gerda Lerna, in a different context, noted how the earliest feminist bible scholars had to continually ‘re-invent the wheel’, as they were unaware of the work of their foremothers. For that reason, as well as my obsessive reading habits, I try to get hold of copies of all the radical feminist works that I can. I plan for them all to be in a big library someday, accessible to all who want to discover radical feminism. (Yes, I’m a dreamer).
Secondhand bookshops are a literally a goldmine: you have to do a little digging, but the rewards are obvious. Dworkin, MacKinnon, Daly, Morgan are among the authors whose work would have been otherwise a mystery to me had I not spent many dusty hours searching the shelves behind ‘Sociology’ sections in secondhand bookshops. The lease of life one can gain from these authors is incredible, the realisation that you’re not crazy, that it’s not just your problem, that what you are feeling is real and concrete and political cannot be overestimated.
The Internet has made it a lot easier to locate and obtain used books, but its full distributional power has not been realized. Someday, I hope the copyright laws are amended so that if publishers allow books to fall out of print, and refuse to make them available in electronic form, other people are free to do so under some sort of compulsory licensing framework that would provide copyright owners with a reasonable royalty, but preclude them from preventing the distribution of creative works. This kind of change could also address the problem of books that are still in publication, but only in inferior versions, such as The Second Sex, which can only be lawfully purchased in English in its current abridged and badly (mis)translated form.
–Ann Bartow
