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I'm afraid you are a little off here, Craig.
Authors do not abdicate 'copyright' when they sign with a publisher. They always hold that. What they do is to assign certain publication rights, which should be clearly and fully included in a formal contract for the protection of all parties. This will cover such things as print rights in various countries, film rights, ebook rights, foreign-language publication rights, etc, etc, bloody etc.
Normally these days, a publishing contract will specify digital rights. Until pretty recently, though, it often didn't because ebooks were an SF pipedream, which is why there's a grey area on some older agreements and a bit of a row going on between some authors, agencies and publishers as to who holds the rights to what.
It's a sticky wicket at times. That's why, I guess, new online stores like Amazon for Kindle run spot-checks on catalogue titles to make sure a publisher does hold indisputable digital rights (we've had two queries this week alone from Amazon -- fortunately, all our contacts are sound and can be immediately produced on demand from a retailer to establish our rights).
Ass-about tip, we were given ebook rights by a major publisher this week on a hardback/paperback title they'd put out of print -- pretty well letting die a retainers death because they have thousands of speculatively mass-run examples of the title gathering dust in a warehouse somewhere. They would not give us print rights to the book, even though we edited from original author raw copy, sub-contracted a new artist for inside illustration and re-designed text and provided a new cover becaus they hope to sell their remaining stock at some ridiculous dime-a-dozen rate to the bargain basement end of the industry.
The loser, of course, is the author and/or agency who didn't clearly set the ground rules in the original agreement.
It's a bloody pain in the Netherlands, but that's the way it cuts, Craig.
Cheers. Neil
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