I’ve been staying clear of the publishing shit-storm du jour — Random House’s claim to backlist e-book rights and Stephen Covey’s decision to sell exclusive digital rights to two of his bestselling books to Amazon rather than his traditional publisher Simon & Schuster — because I simply don’t know enough about rights. But, Peter Ginna, publisher and editorial director of Bloomsbury Press, (who should know a thing or two) has a couple of interesting related posts, ‘The E-Book Wars Have Really Begun’ Part 1 and 2, on the issues.
Leaving the specifics of Covey aside (because I just don’t think you can generalize from his position), Peter Ginna doesn’t seem to think Random House has much of a leg to stand on. Nor, for that matter, does Richard Curtis, or the Author’s Guild. And agents are understandably unhappy…
But my question (to someone who does know something about rights) is if e-books remain essentially shovelware and aren’t substantially transforming the original book as edited and designed by the publisher, don’t Random House kind of have a point?
[Before you yell at me — I’m just curious!]
Dan, thanks for your mention of my posts on the e-book wars. I didn’t mean to dismiss Random House’s argument out of hand–although as I noted, much the same claim was rebuffed in court in a suit that was ultimately settled. Nowadays most everyone would agree that it makes little sense to separate print and ebook rights. Most authors would be happy, and rightly so, to have Random House selling their backlist titles in e-book form. What’s tricky here is that the contracts for the titles at issue don’t mention any royalty splits on e-books (naturally, as they didn’t exist when the contracts were drawn). I think what authors are resisting is the idea of Random House in effect unilaterally determining what royalty to pay on backlist e-books.
Thanks Peter. Royalties. Yes of course. I guess if Random House are claiming that e-books are just extensions of print editions, then the honourable (ha!) thing to do would be give the same royalties for both? But then everyone wants cheaper e-books too…
[…] Reading a Book is Reading a Book — Peter Ginna has another thoughtful post on about the Random House e-book rights controversy (which better articulates some of what I was trying to get at here). […]
Ah the messiness :) Couldn’t publishers take a look at the tv/movie contracts that are worked out between actors and production companies/distributors and see how that works out? Actors tend to receive some sort of royalty on everything ranging from VHS, DVDs, iTune sales, etc.
I figure the challenge for publishers at the moment is that they need to dish out the coin to create these e-books and that is reasoning behind the stance on treating e-books as a new print edition. Of course, regardless of reasoning and logic behind publishing, avid reader or not — the general customer isn’t going to care about that. Price and accessibility are still high priority and giving excuses on why that isn’t happening is like the big telecommunication companies in Canada telling people why cell phone rates won’t decline. The difference however is that there’s a whole lot more freedom and choice in the publishing market.
[…] is essentially a more articulate framing of a question I asked here a couple of weeks ago. But unsurprisingly Galassi offers a far more compelling defence of Random […]