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Originally Posted by speakingtohe
Not quite understanding why a vendor would sign the contract unless the vendor only sold watermarked books, or made a heck of a lot of money from the watermarked books.
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Because as far as I know, there is only one Dutch book distributor left. There's no other way to get books written in Dutch. If they'd not sign the contract and take this to court first, then they'd not have any books to sell. Therefore I think the vendors are doing it the other way around: signing the contract and then see if they can get at least that clause invalidated.
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If it was me, I would be looking at legal options and if possible suing the publisher that has this clause for trying to breach the customers trust or something along these lines, and I would have to be selling a heck of a lot of books annually from this publisher to even consider dealing with them again.
Helen
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This 3rd party forcing the contract onto vendors is not a publisher. It's a distributor. This party distributes (almost) ALL books written in Dutch, published by ALL publishers, and in all probability, they also take care of the watermarking. (They could also be forcing publishers to put the watermarks into the book, obviously.)
Please note:
On the blog, this is stated:
"We work with a 3rd party to deliver the e-books to our consumers."
Normally a large online store has "JIT ordering" (Just In Time ordering). They ALWAYS have books in stock, because when you order one, they forward the order to the distributor, and the paper book is sent to you directly by the distributor. With regard to ebooks, this would even be easier of course; the download could come from the distributor's servers, independent from the company where you bought the book.
As far as I know, the only two distributors doing JIT ordering for ALL stores in the Netherlands were Libridis and Centraal Boekhuis, and the first one is defunct now.
Therefore, in my posts I am
assuming that this mentioned 3rd party is Centraal Boekhuis, but I do
not know this for sure. It is, however, the only party that I can think of that would be powerful enough to force all vendors into a contract they would normally not be willing accept. (No acceptance = no books.)
(BTW: The same is true for Flanders / Vlaanderen: they get their Dutch books at the same source(s) as the Dutch stores.)