UPDATE: New Life for Old Classics, as Their Copyrights Run Out

[Ryan Goble]

New Life for Old Classics, as Their Copyrights Run Out via @NYTimes https://t.co/UazrVD7iKp

— Mary Chinery (@MaryChinery) December 30, 2018

Some quotes of interest:
In anticipation of a flood of new editions of Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” when the copyright expires in 2021, the Fitzgerald estate and his publisher, Scribner, released a new edition of the novel in April, hoping to position it as the definitive version of the text. The novel has sold around 30 million copies worldwide, and continues to sell more than 500,000 copies a year in the United States alone. But in two years, anyone with a laptop will be able to publish an e-book of the text, or sell fan fiction based on the story.

For readers and book buyers, the proliferation of competing texts and editions will mean more selection and cheaper books. In 2019, the digital publisher Open Road Media is publishing around a dozen newly available works from 1923, including e-books of Jean Toomer’s “Cane,” Gibran’s “The Prophet,” Sigmund Freud’s “The Ego and the Id,” P. G. Wodehouse’s “The Inimitable Jeeves” and Christie’s “The Murder on the Links,” one of her early novels featuring the detective Hercule Poirot.

Until now, the publishing house that still bears Knopf’s name has held the North American copyright on the title. But that will change on Jan. 1, when “The Prophet” enters the public domain, along with works by thousands of other artists and writers, including Marcel Proust, Willa Cather, D. H. Lawrence, Agatha Christie, Joseph Conrad, Edith Wharton, P. G. Wodehouse, Rudyard Kipling, Katherine Mansfield, Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens.