[1] Because of a lack of agreed upon international law at the time, this literary piracy was entirely legal, and the immense distance between the two nations made the issue difficult to address.
This treaty allowed the original copyright protection of British literary works to be applied in America and vice versa.
[citation needed] This system fell into place largely because the nation did not have any real individual literary identity at that point in time.
[3] During that period, the United States was still in the early stages of its independent development as a nation and most of what the new American public was comfortable with involved British culture and ideas.
They sold for a low cost because there was no compensation being paid to the original authors back in England for the sole purpose of exposing every educated person in the new American public to "the unbounded treasures of the periodical literature of the present day".