Wait . . . if publishers like the public domain so much, then whey did they let Disney whack it?

In this Slate article, Adelle Waldman reports that a shift in the way book sales are tracked is calling attention to the continuing popularity of "classics" now in the public domain. In the past, low volume sales were simply ignored, as reporting focused on the movement of bestsellers. But the new tracking system makes it clear that all of those incremental purchases of "Wuthering Heights" add up to major dough. Waldman puts it this way:

Interestingly, even recent books that are considered literary don't compare to tried-and-true classics. At Politics & Prose, an independent bookstore in Washington, D.C., Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility sold 18 copies last year, while Snow Falling on Cedars, a literary novel that spent 87 weeks on the Publishers' Weekly best-seller list in 1995, sold only seven. So it's not just because bookstore owners want to edify us that they're as likely to stock Vanity Fair as Bonfire of the Vanities. "A best seller from 10 years ago, nobody wants to read?unless it's by someone like [Gabriel García] Márquez," said Donald Davis, a book-buyer for East Village Books in New York.

And that's why Penguin has seen fit to spend $500,000 promoting Sense and Sensibility, along with its 1,300 other Penguin Classics titles. It wants to corner the market.

Waldman does not, in my estimation, point up the degreee to which the inexpensiveness of the public domain texts contributes to these sales. Because the opportunity costs related to publication are minimized, we see editions at a range of price points, with the wonderful people at the Dover Thrift Editions typically offering the best values. This rarely happens when copyright protection persists. And it is yet another reminder of how misguided the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act really was. The retroactive application of the term extension halted the entry of texts into the public domain, thereby delaying their entry into the richly contested market Penguin is now hoping to "corner." Of course, the very nature of the public domain assures that Penguin will never succeed . . . unless Penguin can consistently offer the best and cheapest editions of the classics. And competition is good, right?