The volume we withdrew
- Volumes checked
- 81The entire catalogue, full-text counter-check for publisher markers
- Objected to
- 1Volume 49, "Winnetous Erben"
- Overlap with the original
- 29%Text comparison against May's 1910 Fehsenfeld edition
- Works lost
- noneThe same work is in the public domain as volume 33
Karl May is in the public domain. That sentence carries our entire catalogue — and it is true, but it is not complete. What is in the public domain is May’s text. Not every version that carries his name.
The finding
Volume 49 of our release plan, Winnetous Erben, was not by Karl May in the sense we need. The text available to us was the adaptation by the Karl May Verlag — edited by Dr E. A. Schmid and Franz Kandolf, Radebeul. The publisher’s imprint stood in the middle of the work. Compared against May’s own version, the overlap was 29 per cent.
An adaptation like that can hold copyright of its own. Producing an audiobook from it would not have been a grey area. It would have been a mistake with an addressee.
Why nothing is lost
The Karl May Verlag issued May’s Winnetou IV under the title Winnetous Erben. It is the same work. Our catalogue carries it as volume 33 in the genuine Fehsenfeld first edition of 1910. Volume 49 was a duplicate in the wrong version.
What we changed
The volume is off the site completely — no catalogue entry, no product page, no sitemap entry. The old product page had been indexed, so it now redirects to volume 33 rather than returning a 404: anyone holding the link arrives at the right work.
And the exclusion rule sits in the generator, not only in the file it produces. Had it sat only there, the volume would have come back on the next run.
What runs differently since
We read the whole catalogue against itself. All eighty-one volumes now carry an edition note; a full-text counter-check for publisher markers found no hit besides volume 49. Eleven volumes name their own publisher — all of them historical, all before 1912.
The most uncomfortable part of the result concerns not the law but the marketing copy. Volumes 1 and 3 turned out to come from the serialised first printing, not the Fehsenfeld book edition. Since then we no longer claim “Fehsenfeld” volume by volume. What holds is “unabridged, from public-domain historical versions” — and what holds is what we write, rather than what would sound better.