Quote:
Originally Posted by cstross
That's very problematic.
If your proposal was adopted in law, unscrupulous publishers would have an active incentive to time-bomb their reversion clause boilerplate. Because? If a book goes into the public domain, the publisher can then roll the presses without paying the author a penny. And they're the folks who are in the best position to profit from a book's initial sales and then keep it out of print for five years. (Then re-issue it and make roughly double their initial profit, at the expense of the author.)
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Sorry, I had written about this more extensively elsewhere, and didn't fill in the details here. What I really mean is that the rights should automatically revert to the author after a period of time being out of print, and then, after an
additional period of time being out of print, the book should fall into the public domain. I'd give the author more time to get the book back into print than the publisher, because they might need to either find another publisher or decide to self-publish. But at this point, even self-publishing when a book has already been published should be a pretty good strategy for an author, using ebooks, POD, or a combination. I'm somewhat hesitant to buy self-published books, because generally I think books benefit from the attention of a good editor, but a book that has already been through the editing process and has some market recognition should sell reasonably well.
What do you think? You're in a better position than I to know how this might really play out. I'm just a wannabe with a stack of rejection slips.