The Life Expectancies of Books is an interesting article about how virtually every book, no matter how popular or worthy, will fall out of print and become essentially lost to history. Copyright issues complicate this process, and may prevent works from being resurrected.
Copyright and the scrapheap of literature
Submitted by jtirrell on January 27, 2006 - 10:47.
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Franco Moretti
has a similar argument in, "The Slaughterhouse of Literature" (MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly - Volume 61, Number 1, March 2000, pp. 207-227), though he doesn't take on the issue of copyright. Moretti mostly looks at dectective novels from the 19C and asks why is that Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories have survived while so many of his competitors have disappeared.