Professor Paul Heald has contributed a new blog post to CREATe, "The Cost of Copyright Revisited: A new study expands research on the public domain to Nordic markets." An excerpt follows:

A number of empirical studies (many of them supported by CREATe) measure how extended copyright terms negatively affect the number of book titles in print.  Simply put, public domain titles are generally more available in new editions than copyrighted books from the same era.  Additional studies also show that the price of copyrighted bound volumes, ebooks, and audio book editions is significantly higher than their public domain counterparts.

All research to date, however, has been conducted in large English language book markets.  A new study (The Cost of Copyright Revisited:  Identifying Competition Effects in Small Markets) measures the availability and pricing of books (bound, ebook, and audiobook) in two small, non-English book markets:  Finland and Sweden.

Read the full post at create.ac.uk.