Geo-Restricted ebooks and Foreign Rights

[DaronFraley]

I saw a discussion on another thread about Geo-Restricted ebooks, and it reminded me of something I have been thinking about for a while.

At first glance, I think Geo-Restricted ebooks is a ridiculous idea.

Physical books are different in some ways from ebooks. Brick and mortar stores stock the books. Those books have been received through distribution channels where shipping costs are involved. From what I understand, they are usually shipped within the country where they were printed. Don't publishers or agents sell publication and distribution rights to a publishing house in the other country so that they can avoid the huge expense of shipping across borders and yet still make some money on the deal?

But with ebooks, we are talking about the internet as the distribution medium. Distribution happens in seconds, without trucks, boxes, or people handling the stock.

Therefore, doesn't it make more sense for ebook rights to be split up by language? Then if a book is translated to German, it could be sold in any country where German speaking readers live?

Perhaps I am totally clueless about how foreign rights work, and why ebooks are geographically restricted. If so, enlighten me.

[jehane]

As I understand it, publishing rights are divided by region. Using English-language areas as an example, the Australian region is separate to the UK region is separate to the North American region. Not sure if North America is a single region or whether that's broken up into US/Canada. Likewise Aust/NZ/Pacific. I have no idea whether the same applies for other languages.

Australia has protectionist publishing policies preventing parallel imports. This is highly unlikely to change any time soon since a review just last year was ignored after a successful PR campaign by the publishing lobby. However this did not stop people in Australia from purchasing print books from a publisher or retailer overseas and importing directly, it was just retailers in Australia who couldn't. However the difference with ebooks is that while the point of sale for print was deemed to be the location of the seller, the POS for digital is deemed to be the location of the buyer. Hence Australians not being able to buy many ebooks.

I agree that worldwide language rights for digital editions makes sense, however the publishing industry is still working out how to deal with digital formats and is more worried about DRM than geo-restrictions. At the moment they just see digital as another format like HC, TPB and MMPB, and the rights are packaged accordingly. I think in future we will start to see worldwide digital rights as separate to print rights, however most recent books will still be covered under regional contracts. The push may need to come from authors and their agents.

[neilmarr]

Hya Daron:

Contracts with publishers are usually negotiated by agents, whose job it is (and whose interest its in because they're on a percentage of author return) to maximise author return.

Often this means that it's more financially attractive to the author/agent to sell rights to separate publishers around the world. (Sometimes a publisher may be authorised to sell rights to another foreign publisher or a subsidiary of its own as a kind of agent's agent). That's why you'll often see a paper book in one country with, for instance, a different cover, adjusted text content, or even a new title, and with a different release date (this last being critically important).

The system has worked well for a century. But online book sales have rocked the boat ... then the red tape kicked in when ebooks arrived.

It was soon established by governments around the world that a physical book's point-of-sale is the country where the order is placed and from which the book is dispatched. But the point-of-sale of an ebook is taken as the local location of the machine used for download.

In other words, if you buy a new blockbuster in paperback or hardback from Amazon, the point-of-sale will be the Amazon base from which your order is received, packaged and dipatched, often the US. If you want to download the same title produced by the same local-rights holding publisher in ebook, the point-of-sale is where you actually download, which might be Hong Kong, Brisbane or Cape Town, where a completely different publisher holds rights to the title. So ... geographical restrictions kick in.

These problems are beyond the control of retailers and publishers, though I do agree that the blame largely lies with publishers and agents for sheer shortsightedness.

Some publishers (like my own indie house -- link below) foresaw this problem arising a decade ago and have always negotiated full international distribution rights contracts for ebook along with treebook. Others (especially the big boys and major agencies) were slower on the uptake and things are in a twist as a result.

There will eventually be a fix, but I can't think what it will be unless authors' agents work with publishers to reach a compromise where a single publisher gets international paper and ebook rights or one publisher gets international treebook and another international ebook, with higher author royalties taken into consideration to compensate, and those two cooperate to make things work smoothly for all concerned ... including the reader.

Best wishes. Neil

PS: Oh, and there's one other thing that might well go if such a sensible agreement is made ... ebooks might become ...

[FF2]

I think the restrictions will have to fall away eventually but we may have to recognize the different colourations or is the colorations of language....

[DavidKitson]

I wouldn't hold my breath for such restrictions, or DRM, to go away. Sorry. Not going to happen.

My rationale? Because if you've talked to enough people, you'll find a HUGE number of them really, honestly, genuinely believe that the only way to make money out of a book is to restrict all access to it. Make every single person pay for every word they read. And absolutely, no question, may anyone be allowed to copy a book without permission or buy outside of their region. Even second hand book sales are fundamentally wrong to them.

Yep, such beliefs are pretty strong. Especially in the established print industry. They see the Internet as fundamentally evil and would like E-books to be banned ( How do you burn a digital edition? ) - Many accept DRM and region-locks only because they are forced to.

These attitudes WILL NOT CHANGE and WILL NOT GO AWAY.

All that will happen is that not everyone will follow these beliefs. Around here, these ideas are few and far between. Those who read these pages are the more enlightened of course, or they wouldn't be here.

So the sad thing is, that these people are the enemy of electronic distribution models. They will hang on tooth and nail and cause untold damage to the archives of humanity. DRM keys will be lost. E-editions will fall silent to failures in the protection systems that they employ.

Faced with a consumer backlash at such occurrences, these people will employ lobby groups to force government to support these restrictions and so they will continue.

Best thing you can do? Support those who believe in what you want. If you want DRM free, then make a personal policy to prefer DRM free. Likewise region-free. Then only time will fix the damage. That and others supporting similar ideals.

But look at Region issues in video games and DVDs for an idea of how nasty this battle will be. Breaking region restrictions is illegal in many countries. IP laws are already being redrafted to support this functionality and enshrine the protections in legislation.

These fights have been seen before. Remember how Shareware started as a distribution method for computer software back in the 80's? Now downloading software is considered the normal way to get it. Especially the licensed stuff.

And it only took, what, 2 decades?

Expect at least half that for books. They are far more entrenched in the physical world than video games and software ever was.

David.

[DavidKitson]

Originally Posted by FF2

I think the restrictions will have to fall away eventually but we may have to recognize the different colourations or is the colorations of language....

Language? I think the translations from google are pretty awesome... I have worked my way through many foreign documents, websites and forums. They work pretty well.

I don't think it will be that long before the technology gets to the point that you can quickly translate an entire story almost as well as a human translator can. At least to the point that a skilled human translator can quickly fix up a manuscript.

Of course, they still have their limitations. eg, my Story Blurb converted to Japanese and back to English looks like this... ( courtesy of Google ).

"Evil yuan to the pilot, Jon Carlson's, when Rachel meets a beautiful humanity, it is a match made in heaven. Literally, Rachel is Hadakara ANGEL. She is also the AI control the immense power and ability to android. John finds himself drawn into the world of these mysterious works of mankind, he intended to fight a war of self following superweapons unwittingly participating in the program will be created."

Hmmm. It was supposed to read like this.

"When Ex-DEMON pilot Jon Carlson meets beautiful humanitarian Rachel, it's a match made in HEAVEN. Literally, because Rachel's an ANGEL. She's also an AI controlled android of immense power and capability. As Jon finds himself drawn into the world of these enigmatic creations of mankind, he unknowingly becomes involved in a program to create autonomous superweapons intended to fight the next war."

But if there was some way I could tell it DEMON and ANGEL are abbreviations in this case and define the specialist terms... Then even with the context issues, it still would be a lot closer to what I originally wrote.

David

[bevdeforges]

Originally Posted by DaronFraley

Therefore, doesn't it make more sense for ebook rights to be split up by language? Then if a book is translated to German, it could be sold in any country where German speaking readers live?

Be careful what you wish for...

You really wouldn't want German language books restricted to sale in (or to) German speaking countries. One of the big markets (or so I imagine) for e-books is for folks living outside their country of origin.

It's difficult (and expensive) to find current English language reading material where I live (France). Germans living in France would like to be able to buy German language books and magazines without having to physically go back home to a book shop. But even when dealing with p-books there are geographical restrictions - my German friend living in France claims that Amazon in the UK would not sell her English language books for shipment to France. (Claims it's because of her German based credit card.)

Some of it relates, too, to VAT (sales tax to those in the US, though it works a little differently). When you download commercial software, you are charged VAT according to where you, the customer, are located and that's the concept they've adopted for e-books. With p-books, you pay the VAT at the seller's location (with some complications for sellers like Amazon, who have businesses in multiple countries).

[HarryT]

You can blame the authors for geographical restrictions. It's the author's decision to sign separate contracts for separate countries: they make more money that way.

[DavidKitson]

Originally Posted by HarryT

You can blame the authors for geographical restrictions. It's the author's decision to sign separate contracts for separate countries: they make more money that way.

True... It's not just the publishers who believe in geographic restrictions.

David.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by DavidKitson

True... It's not just the publishers who believe in geographic restrictions.

David.

The publisher doesn't have any say in the matter. If the author has only given a publisher, say, UK only distribution rights for a book, then the publisher CANNOT sell outside the UK, however much they want to do so.

[Kali Yuga]

Originally Posted by DaronFraley

Don't publishers or agents sell publication and distribution rights to a publishing house in the other country so that they can avoid the huge expense of shipping across borders and yet still make some money on the deal?

Nope.

Printing and shipping is a small slice of costs. Lots of books are printed in cheap labor markets (e.g. China) anyway, and shipped to another location.

"Local printing" might have been a bigger reason 20 or 30 years ago, but even then the real driving issue was "local marketing" and managing local business issues.

For example, if I am a Canadian author, chances are neither me nor my publisher is capable of: Prepping a German translation, finding good German distributors, finding good German press outlets to talk to, schmoozing the right people, paying all the appropriate local taxes and fees, and of course collecting payments. It's much, much harder to perform these critical tasks (especially collecting on delinquent payments) if you aren't in Germany and don't speak German.

And, like it or not, there is often a preference for local businesses, both on the part of the citizens and the government. Some nations (China and India in particular) won't let you do business at all unless you partner with a local company or distributor.

Now, multiply this effort against, oh, 20 nations, and you'll see how even the largest publishers are unlikely to have these capabilities.

If you're a small author and have little intention of selling internationally, then it probably make sense to sign over international rights to one publisher. But for those authors who do hope to get their work sold abroad, that is not going to cut it, especially if the publisher is small.

Originally Posted by DaronFaley

Therefore, doesn't it make more sense for ebook rights to be split up by language?

Retailers perhaps. Rights, not really. Like it or not, the Internet simply has not obliterated all national or regional concerns and borders.

Even then, I'm not sure everyone would really be happy if, for example, Amazon turned into the One Ebook Retailer to unite them all and in the dollar bind them.

Meanwhile, the expat market is not exactly huge. For example, Germany has one of the largest expat populations; there may be 3 million German expats, out of a population of 81m; that's about 3.7%. Japan has around 750,000 expats out of 127m, or about 0.6%.

So, carving out something for the few markets with lots of expats (UK, Germany, Italy) might make sense. Everyone else will probably run into diminishing returns.


Eventually this will get worked out. This, of course, requires patience and the abandonment of a massive sense of entitlement by the people who insist on investing in technologies before the products even make it to market.

But the reality is that making these kinds of changes simply do not happen overnight -- and that often, it's better to let a solution grow slowly and gradually rather than give in to the demands of a handful of early adopters.

[SleepyBob]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The publisher doesn't have any say in the matter. If the author has only given a publisher, say, UK only distribution rights for a book, then the publisher CANNOT sell outside the UK, however much they want to do so.

Well, they do decide to enter a contract where they don't have those rights, rather than pay what they must to be able to sell the work worldwide.

Existing works are one thing. But now, they don't have the excuse for new contracts that they didn't know they might want world-wide publishing rights in the current environment.

[Fbone]

I also understand there are "gentleman's agreements" between publishers that prevent them from intruding into other markets.

[DavidKitson]

Originally Posted by SleepyBob

Well, they do decide to enter a contract where they don't have those rights, rather than pay what they must to be able to sell the work worldwide.

Existing works are one thing. But now, they don't have the excuse for new contracts that they didn't know they might want world-wide publishing rights in the current environment.

How many authors have the power to dictate such rights anyway? Unless you're a best-seller, you pretty much have to take what you can get. Most authors probably offer "North American" rights only because every guide on how to pitch to publishers I've ever read seems to say this is how you do it.

Most publishers of p-books could say "Hey, thanks for your submission. You can have 5c per book we sell and we get international printing rights" and most authors trying to get into the market would say "Great! Thankyou!".

Hmmm. Even E-book publishers could probably get away with that, but it's kind of moot.

Anyway, if it didn't suit the publishers, I'm sure they would have done away with regional restrictions long ago.

David.

[moyeen]

I saw a discussion on another thread about Geo-Restricted ebooks, and it reminded me of something I have been thinking about for a while.