In a recent op-ed for The NY Times, ‘There’s More to Publishing Than Meets the Screen’, Jonathan Galassi, president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, asked:
Are e-books a new frontier in publishing, a fresh version of the author’s work? Or are they simply the latest editions of the books produced by publishers like Random House?
This 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 House than I could manage:
[S]hould another company be able to issue e-book versions of Random House’s editions without its involvement? An e-book version of Mr. Styron’s “The Confessions of Nat Turner” will contain more than the author’s original words. It will also comprise Mr. Loomis’s editing, as well as all the labor of copy editing, designing and producing, not to mention marketing and sales, that went into making it a desirable candidate for e-book distribution. Mr. Styron’s books took the form they have, are what they are today, not only because of his remarkable genius but also, as he himself acknowledged, because of the dedicated work of those at Random House.
I think the point here is that books are often a collaboration between author and publisher, and in this sense publishers add value — or, at least, they did in the past. Galassi’s example is Styron, but we now know that Raymond Carver’s editor Gordon Lish was instrumental in defining the author’s trademark style. No doubt there are other high profile examples…
As Peter Ginna, director of Bloomsbury Press, points out in this post, and in a comment on my post here, there are definitely some issues around royalty payments that Random House need to address. But while e-books are little more than converting the file format of a work, I do have some sympathy for Random House’s argument about rights.
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