Quote:
Originally Posted by Baumi
If it weren't for existing contracts, your publisher wouldn't need a UK operation to sell digital goods to someone in the UK. Baen sells books worldwide from the US.
|
Because Baen has contracts that permit it.
Quote:
|
The only sensible way out of this mess would be e-publishing rights that are divided up by languages instead of territories: Sell the worldwide English language publishing rights to company A, sell the French language rights to company B.
|
I'm an author. I want the best deal I can get. Do I
want to do that?
My interest is in getting the best deal I can, and if I can get more out of selling my book to multiple publishers instead of one, guess what I'll do?
And it leaves out the thorny issue of how my book gets into other languages in the first place.
Quote:
|
Don't ask me how to fairly translate old compensation terms to the new contract model - that should keep an army of lawyers and agents busy for a while. Plus, of course, there'd still be the issue of localized marketing, but US players could hire UK subcontractors to do that and vice versa. Same for all the other English-speaking countries.
|
Re the lawyers, a comment an old friend made about something that happened where he worked - "The lawyers have not yet been born who will get rich off of the litigation about this!" - probably applies.
And localized marketing is a reason you get published by a local publisher. But it's not likely to be an issue for most titles. The marketing dollars get reserved for bestsellers, and are mostly a means of letting the author's following know a new one exists.
Quote:
|
Whenever eBooks become the norm rather than the exception, this model shouldn't be too hard to implement for new digital releases, but as long as they're just an (often unloved) add-on to the pBook release, they'll be hampered by artificial restrictions.
|
Don't bet on it. I worked for a while for an outfit that did streaming video. We had clients who had rights to show video streams
here, but not
there, and we had to implement geo-location to determine if someone trying to watch the feed was in a place the client had the right to show it. You can see the same thing now in some YouTube offerings.
Digital content is digital content. Territory issues won't go away just because you can deliver over the Internet.
______
Dennis