Just Do Not Know What They Are Doing

Penguin Paperback, the classics republishers, just had their 70th birthday party.  it was 70 years ago that the publisher was started to reprint classics in a new font, with interesting cover, and commentary back and front, and sometimes a new translation.  This was enough to earn the right to copyright say the Aeneid or Last of the Mohicans.  A business is born.

The article to which I link is about royalties on ebooks, and how an agent named Wylie is shaking the publishing world up, but I would like to point out something else.

Since absolutely anyone can reprint the classics (either never copyrighted or out of copyright) what is it that Penguin does that makes is successful?  It cannot be a mwre copyright, which anyone can do, and the results are exactly the same: monopoly. It packages nicely, to be sure, but the Penguin success is based on marketing, not monopoly.

It is a case of post hoc ergo propter hoc: "it must be our monopoly, not our marketing" since gaining monopoly precedes the marketing.

There are others that reprint the classics and also get a monopoly.  Their translators are as good as anyone working for Penguin.  The difference again is marketing.

Copyrights are a downward spiral: believing in, and relying on, copyright monopoly, less effort is made in marketing, and so less returns means concentrating on what is believed to the the strength, that is monopoly, and so down it goes, like newspapers suing their readers.

But anyone could then print a penguin classic and sell it!

No they could not "and sell it..."  To whom?  Penguins customers?  At what price?  The same?  No, necessarily lower... and what did these books cost?  More, because the pirates print fewer.  Where did they print?  With second tier printers...  The entire materials sourcing, distribution, manufacturing, and distribution chain costs more and is less service oriented to pirates, even in a market free of copyrights.  The problem with the premise is it is ahistorical: there are no instances in the history of mankind where the posed problem ever occurred.  On the other hand, Penguin itself, is a great example of "marketing matters, copyrights do not..."

But copyrights protect consumers!  Nonsense.  Consumers protect themselves. Once consumer find they have a shoddy product, they exact revenge on the vendors at the head of the system that burned them.  It does not take long.