I'm curious just what percent of their revenues are from 20, 30 year old books.

Myself, I buy a lot of old books - but from the thrift store. The only reason the thrift store sells them is because people dump their valueless books on them.

> Nope. They may have standing, but they're responsible for their own actions.

Actually, they kind of are forced into action here. Even if they were okay with the IA doing this (which I'm sure they're not) they still have to defend their copyrights, otherwise they could be declared abandoned and the works would then be in the public domain and could not be defended when someone they don't want to use their works then uses them

You're thinking of trademark. That requires active defense. Copyright does not.

People buy old books all the time. The best-selling book of all time is thousands of years old, after all.

I assume you’re talking about the bible, which is obviously not copyrighted, so where does the idea comes from that nobody will continue to buy old content if it’s in the public domain?

Translations of the Bible are almost always copyrighted, unless it's the King James version, which IIRC isn't really that popular anymore. For that matter, all translations are copyrighted.

The copyrighted translations are not thousands of years old, which kind of defeats the original point. I mean I understand it was a kind of exaggeration for effect, but excepting a very few 'evergreen' titles, the value of a publisher's back catalog tails off very rapidly with age.