Feh. If HC had the rights, they sat on them for a good long time without ever releasing an e-book. And the author herself granted e-book rights specifically to the Open Road people.
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In a statement, an Open Road spokesperson said, “While we have not seen the complaint and therefore cannot comment, Open Road has been granted the ebook rights by the author and is confident that the HarperCollins claim is without merit.”
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There really ought to be a "use it or lose it" convention when it comes to publishing in new media formats and rights reversion in general.
HC is simply being predatorily grabby now that they've realized there's a paying audience which wants this author's work in e-format and is twisting some vaguely inclusive somewhat tech-related terms in a 1971 agreement written long before e-books were even conceived.
I hope this case gets dismissed on lack of merit, and pointed and laughed at a lot as an example of UR DOIN IT WRONG.
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However, as Publishers Marketplace notes, HarperCollins “have sued only the e-publisher Open Road, for infringement, and not their author George, for breach of contract.” George is 93 years old.
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Well, I see they have some vague notion of avoiding too much bad publicity.
Maybe she could counter-sue them for, like, sitting on the rights they supposedly held for so long without actually releasing an e-book and thereby squatting on her intellectual property and lowering its market worth by denying her a valuable income stream from the exercise of publishing it in a now industry-standard media market, which as her publisher, they're supposed to do by keeping her books "in print", and is now acting in bad faith to continue to deny her this valuable income stream from her intellectual property.
Or something as equally ridiculous as HC's retroactive
ALL YOUR BOOKS ARE BELONG TO US* claims.
* Only made once they got signal. One can only hope they are on the way to destruction in this particular matter and any similar attempts.