Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew H.
It is almost as if [strikethrough]publishers[/strikethrough] authors would rather their books, etc were pirated, rather than legally purchased.
It's as author thing, not a publisher thing. Suhrkamp can't sell you a copy of "Die Brandung" (or whatever) because the author didn't sell them the US rights.
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It can be both.
A few years ago I actually e-mailed a few authors (after trying publishers and getting no answer) to ask about the unavailability of their books for me, and at least one of them got back to me and said that as far as she knows (and she'd consulted her agent, too) her US publisher had global ebook rights (or maybe it was global outside the other main English-speaking market, i.e. UK, Ireland, possibly Australia).
In other words, her publisher had the rights to sell the books to me and anyone else outside the US (and possibly UK). They just hadn't bothered. (She did promise to nudge her publisher, and a year or so later, the books did become available also for me.)
The impression I got at the time - not just in this case - was that some publishers felt that actually having the books on sale outside their main market, even if they didn't have to physically ship anything anywhere, was just too much hassle for what they probably assumed would be very little return. I don't know the accounting side of publishing, but perhaps it was (or used to be, or was considered to be) more cumbersome to do accounting with a few copies sold to a number of countries, or something?
Most of the time though, yeah, it's more an author thing than a publisher thing. Although it can be both - it can be that the author would be happy to sell the global rights too but the publisher doesn't wish to pay any extra or negotiate extra conditions because they don't expect a good enough return.
The one thing that annoys me is that while I understand authors holding back the rights for one or the other major English-language markets (e.g. a US author not wanting to give their US publisher global ebook rights because they expect to be picked up by a UK publisher as well, and the UK publisher would, naturally enough, wish to have UK ebook rights), there really is no point IMHO in holding back the rights for international sales outside the major English-speaking regions.
Publishers in most countries will never buy the book for translation (unless we're talking someone in Stephen King or Dan Brown bestseller range) and even if they do, most people in those countries who already prefer to read in English are not going to read the translation anyway if they at all can avoid that, so having English ebooks available shouldn't cannibalise the future potential sales of translations.