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Originally Posted by MikeB1972
Most contracts include an out of print clause anyway, I doubt there are many books that have continually been in print for 35 years, so the rights will have already reverted to the author.
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You would be surprised.
Publishers have all sorts of tricks for squatting on copyrights; the simplest is to carry a box of books on a shelf and list it in a catalog with other "dead books" so they are still officially on sale.
Lately, they've started claiming that they don't even need the one box of unsold books because with POD "all books are always in print".
Doesn't mean they promote them or even try to get them on distributors' lists.
They just hoard them in case they ever get around to re-issuing them say, as ebooks...
The 1978 law and the typical contract reversion clauses are both intended to protect against this kind of junkyard dog squatting but since the BPHs have lawyers that need to justify their existence they have lots of ways to muddy the waters so that just because a book is unavailable for purchase that sill doesn't mean it is legally out of print.
Last month, The Business Rusch website shed some light on this:
http://kriswrites.com/2012/10/24/the...hts-reversion/
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Slowly, traditional publishers have realized that backlist titles are worth a lot of money. Traditional publishers are doing everything they can to make these old publishing contracts (and even the new ones) into contracts that exist in perpetuity while seeming to follow contract law. It’s a dicey proposition which will take a lot of legal wrangling to settle.
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