Distribution of Publication Year
I was curious when most of the books I've got were published since I've done a lot of the community pricing titles.
What surprised me was the lack of representation between 1923-1975.
Comments
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Very interesting chart!
The year of publication is not always trustworthy. For a long time Logos was in the habit of putting the date when they'd digitized older resources instead of the original date of publication. They've changed that policy, but they might have only gotten through the much older ones in fixing it. So all the books from 1923-1975 might have been ones that they haven't gotten around to fixing yet.
Another explanation is that the books in that date range aren't out of copyright yet, so they wouldn't be appearing in Community Pricing, and yet people would not want to pay full price for many of the books from those dates since the writing will sound dated even if the theology in them is still quite relevant, and in some cases the content will be superseded by new discoveries.
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One also wonders if we weren’t riding the wave of the earlier preachers through much of the nineteen hundreds so the Church was relatively silent those years. At any rate, it is very interesting, William!
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William Gabriel said:
What surprised me was the lack of representation between 1923-1975
Hi William,
What is the source of your graph? I share below info supported by Google Ngram Viewer. I chose a different range (1800's to 2012).
Here is the web page https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=religious+publication+&year_start=1800&year_end=2012&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Creligious%20publication%3B%2Cc0
Meanwhile, Jesus kept on growing wiser and more mature, and in favor with God and his fellow man.
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William Gabriel said:
What surprised me was the lack of representation between 1923-1975.
You chart seems to be typical - I recognized this distribution resembles "the Missing 20th Century" at once: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/03/the-missing-20th-century-how-copyright-protection-makes-books-vanish/255282/
Have joy in the Lord!
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Rosie Perera said:
Another explanation is that the books in that date range aren't out of copyright yet, so they wouldn't be appearing in Community Pricing, and yet people would not want to pay full price for many of the books from those dates since the writing will sound dated even if the theology in them is still quite relevant, and in some cases the content will be superseded by new discoveries.
There is also a post somewhere where someone (Bob?) says that mid-twentieth century are the hardest books to licence.
I imagine that in many cases the author is dead, the estate doesn't know much, and the original publisher has been bought/sold/merged/split so many times that it takes a detective to find out who actually holds the contract. And then the lawyers have to fight about whether or not that contract includes electronic rights. And of course there are no electronic files, so you have both the extra text production costs of a CP, and the royalty costs of a modern book.
Scott E. Mahle said:One also wonders if we weren’t riding the wave of the earlier preachers through much of the nineteen hundreds so the Church was relatively silent those years.
I don't know about American Evangelicalism, but that is definitely not true for Swedish authors (Nyström, Aulén, Wingren, Giertz, Hammarskjöld, Stendahl...), and it's definitely not true for the Catholic Church (Chenu, Congar, Daniélou, de Lubac, Garrigou-Lagrange, Maritain, Teilhard de Chardin, Bouyer, Guardini, Bea, von Balthasar, Rahner, Schillebeeckx, Vorgrimmler, Küng, von Speyr, Stein, Chapman, Dulles, Lonergan...)
Personally, it's the 16th to 19th centuries I tend to avoid.
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Beloved said:
Hi William,
What is the source of your graph? I share below info supported by Google Ngram Viewer. I chose a different range (1800's to 2012).
I created my graph by looking at the results in my catalog.db database:
select substr(publicationdate,length(publicationdate)-3) as yr, count(*) from records where isavailable>0 and publicationdate!='' and publicationdate != 'n.d.' group by yr order by yr;
This gives me the number of books I own for each year (or the last year if it's a range). They may not work perfectly for everyone. I have several books in my database that aren't mine anymore (perseus collection), and those get filtered out because "isavailable" == 0. But I noticed those have various values that don't fit that pattern. Most of my publicationdate values are the year (e.g. 2013) or a range (e.g. 1989-1990).
The big spike in 1998 is WBC (47 books) and Spurgeon's Sermons (63 books), and the big spike in 1909 was from The Pulpit Commentary (73 books).
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fgh said:
I imagine that in many cases the author is dead, the estate doesn't know much, and the original publisher has been bought/sold/merged/split so many times that it takes a detective to find out who actually holds the contract. And then the lawyers have to fight about whether or not that contract includes electronic rights. And of course there are no electronic files, so you have both the extra text production costs of a CP, and the royalty costs of a modern book.
That entirely makes sense. The whole reason I thought to check the dates was from all the public domain material that just came in the Mega Pack. I would expect there to be a bit of a drop off at the edge, and your explanation (along with Rosie) shows why there's a bit of a wasteland there.
It's a bummer that copyright is so long. Seems to be a farce to say that it's to promote the progress of science and useful arts yet keeping extending it further and further back.
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William Gabriel said:
I created my graph by looking at the results in my catalog.db database:
William,
Thanks for the disclosure. Very nice work.
Meanwhile, Jesus kept on growing wiser and more mature, and in favor with God and his fellow man.
International Standard Version. (2011). (Lk 2:52). Yorba Linda, CA: ISV Foundation.
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fgh said:
Personally, it's the 16th to 19th centuries I tend to avoid.
[:)] Funny how those are the centuries I favour.
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