Quote:
Originally Posted by Phogg
I not only do not want to support the big publishing houses, I want them to fail if their business model includes perpetual control of the Intellectual property of their respective authors.
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In order for the long-term control of intellectual property to become a big issue for an author, he or she needs to have been quite unusual in terms of short term success. Not all of those authors are affluent, but, by and large, they don't need our sympathy.
Also, if terms are more favorable to the author in long-term control of copyright rights, they will be less favorable in others. I think if you look at the publishers who have intellectual property terms more to your liking, you will find that they pay low -- or no -- advances. This represents a shifting of the risk the book will fail from the publisher to the author. That isn't positive to authors.
But, being a reader and not an author, my main reason for cheering on big publishers is that they make books better. Right now I am reading an oral history book, published by Cambridge University Press, on the dramatic story of the people of Quemoy Island, whose lives were forever changed when invaded by the mainland Chinese in 1949 and subject to a near-totalitarian military occupation:
http://www.amazon.com/Cold-War-Islan.../dp/0521726409
I expect to finish it because of the subject matter, but I don't think I have ever found a big five history title this turgid.
The author thanks his academic publisher for pushing him to stress the larger significance of the story. In actuality, this approach nearly ruins the book, with vague summary sentences invoking geopolitical significance on almost every page. The word geopolitical must appear hundreds of times, sometimes more than once in a sentence. This is the kind of story-telling interruption that an insistent Random House Penguin editor would almost surely have prevented.