Every year, when UNESCO’s World Book and Copyright Day comes around, I can’t help experiencing mixed feelings.

I’m fine with having a world book day. UNESCO speaks of the day as a “celebration of the power of books”:

Books are like a window onto another world – with each new page, they introduce us to new people, new cultures and new ideas.

I’m happy to celebrate books as a “bridge between generations and across cultures”, but I’m not so happy to celebrate a legal obstacle that so often stops me from turning the page to “new people, new cultures and new ideas”. Why add copyright to this celebration? 

The International Publishers Association (IPA) also celebrates the day.  Hugo Setzer, a past president of that association, states the rationale:

Copyright, which is the legal framework that precisely allows the book ecosystem to flourish, is also celebrated. Thanks to Copyright, thousands of authors and publishers around the world can invest time and money in publishing works that enrich society, with the certainty that their efforts will be rewarded.

That would be wonderful if copyright did not:

• without great expense to my university, prevent my students from accessing articles I have written
• make it prohibitively expensive for me to reproduce in my book a figure from a seminal book by Everett M. Rogers (Rogers 1962) published 64 years ago by The Free Press (!). The diagram in question is – presumably illegally – to be found on dozens of websites
• prevent my access to a news item (“The Subcommittee on Science…” 1928) published in a scientific journal in almost a century ago
• restrict access to books by blind and visually handicapped readers in South Africa, where a determined publishers’ lobby has for years used every delaying tactic in the book to block a copyright amendment bill intended to implement the Marrakesh Treaty of 2013 (EIFL, n.d.)

The theory is great. The original British Statute of [Queen] Anne of 1710, was a significant step forward. It was intended “For the Encouragement of Learning and for Securing the Property of Copies of Books to the rightful Owners thereof”. It protected the rights of authors whilst ensuring that society was not deprived of access to new writings. Since then, authors (other than writers of bestsellers and prescribed undergraduate texts) have faded into the background. Copyright today mainly protects powerful corporations at the cost of both authors and readers. For me, as an academic author, the current intellectual property dispensation is a regular source of frustration.

Happy Book Day, everyone!

References

EIFL. n.d. “Copyright Reform in South Africa | EIFL.” Accessed May 1, 2026. https://www.eifl.net/eifl-in-action/copyright-reform-south-africa.

Rogers, Everett M. 1962. Diffusion of Innovations. Free Press.

“The Subcommittee on Science and Bibliography of the League of Nations.” 1928. Science 68 (1755): 150–51.