Quote:
Originally Posted by roger64
This battle about special distribution rights limited to a specific country or zone has been fought and lost by music distributors. In the meantime, piracy skyrocketed.
It will happen now for ebooks. The digital "weight" of an ebook is much lighter than a MP3 file...You do not need to be a big prophet to realize where the consumers will be going. After some years of bleeding losses, publishers will try to adapt to this elusive market with more realistic offers.
We have been there before...
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You are absolutely correct that the battle has been fought by music distributors. Not entirely clear that it has been lost, but that's not really relevant to my next point.
The key issue here is this: Many publishers
do not hold world-wide distribution rights to the books they publish -- even for electronic publishing. This is exactly the source of the problem. The publisher can't (legally) sell outside their region. So their lawyers are telling them "Put a stop to out-of-region sales before we get sued for a zillion dollars!"
Given how their contracts are written and the particular rights the publishers do (and don't) own, the lawyers are absolutely correct! (It really hurts me to say that, but...) It may be regrettable, it's certainly not very realistic in online reality, and it's for
darn sure a PITA for the customers, but nevertheless that's the way things are.
You don't have to think "publishers have their head in the sand" to understand what's going on. Even if they want to get world-wide rights for eBook purposes, they face the problem that the rights on that other continent (the one right over
there!) have already been sold to some competing publisher. And there may be three or four completely different companies
each of which owns rights for some subset of the world.
Very very few publishers actually hold world-wide e-rights. Baen typically does, because they insist on buying that way. But, in return, they purchase non-exclusive eRights -- the author and his/her agent can sell non-exclusive rights to other publishers too. It's instructive to note that Baen has lost at least one popular author and series because the author's agent advised him not to sell world-wide e-rights. Sigh. And any company that was not as forward-looking as Baen generally has e-Rights only for the regions they have paper rights for.
Given all of this, how shall we untangle the rights picture without screwing somebody out of something (e-Rights in a particular region) that they've legitimately bought and paid for?
Xenophon
P.S. To the best of my knowledge, the different companies hold the rights in different regions has
not yet been resolved in the music world. That's certainly a part of why the iTunes stores are not the same world-wide, for example. Is anyone aware of newer developments there?