Copyright Payments in Eighteenth-Century Britain, 1701–1800

David Fielding and Shef Rogers ()
Additional contact information
Shef Rogers: Department of English and Linguistics, University of Otago, New Zealand

No 1506, Working Papers from University of Otago, Department of Economics

Abstract: Although there have been extensive critical studies of the laws and conceptual understandings of early modern copyright in the past few decades, less attention has been devoted to the authorial payments that followed from those developments. Studies of individual authors or genres have collected details of payments to authors, but no comparative study of the values of those payments exists. This essay assesses 439 examples of copyright payments about which we know enough to match the payment to a particular edition of a book so that we can ascertain the book’s physical format and construction and thus estimate a publisher’s expenses relative to the price paid for the copy. We offer some comparative context for this Data within the larger body of publications across the century, in order to Gauge the degree to which these results are representative.

Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2015-06, Revised 2015-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-ipr
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.otago.ac.nz/economics/otago109849.pdf First version, 2015 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:otg:wpaper:1506

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Otago, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Janet Bryant ().