How many orphan works are there? 580,388 according to one count
By Paul Biba
Now here is an analysis, from Personanondata, that we really need if we are going to make any intelligent decisions about the Google Book settlement. I don’t have the expertise to evaluate it, but maybe some of our readers do. Luckily, the author goes into great detail about how he made his calculations. Comments anyone?
Clearly one of the most (if not the most) contentious issue regarding the Google Book Settlement (GBS) centers on the nebulous community of “orphans and orphan titles”. And yet, through the entirety of the discussion since the Google Book Settlement agreement was announced, no one has attempted to define how many orphans there really are. Allow me: 580,388. How do I know? Well, I admit, I do my share of guess work to get to this estimate, but I believe my analysis is based on key facts from which I have extrapolated a conclusion. Interestingly, I completed this analysis starting from two very different points and the first results were separated by only 3,000 works (before I made some minor adjustments). …
Before I delve into my analysis, it might be useful to make some observations about the current discussion on the number of orphans. First, when commentators discuss this issue, they refer to the ‘millions’ of orphan titles. This is both deliberate obfuscation and lazy reporting: Most notably, the real issue is not titles but the number of works. My analysis attempts to identify the number of ‘works’; Titles are a multiple of works. A work will often have multiple manifestations or derivations (paperback, library version, large print, etc.) and thus, while the statement that there may be ‘millions of Orphans titles’ may be partially correct, it is entirely misleading when the true measure applicable to the GBS discussion is how many orphan works exist. It is the owner (or parent) of the work we want to find. …
September 9th, 2009 at 8:40 pm
If, as I suspect, PersonaNonData is not including shorter works originally published in magazines that are too short to be published as standalone works in his estimate, then the number of orphan works really is in the millions.