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Originally Posted by darryl
Some of the more innovative publishers now are leading the way. I don't know all of the characteristics that they will have. However, some do seem to be apparent. They will pay authors much higher royalties. Small advances if any will be the norm.
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This innovation amounts to a compromise between ethical publishing and the old fashioned vanity press, shifting risk from publishers to authors.
It would be wonderful for a corrupt politician, relatively safe now that newspaper investigative staff have been hollowed out, but worried about a book author whose investigation needs advance funding.
Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
It would be a foolish author who signed away their rights for the whole of the copyright term. I've no idea how many authors actually do so - do you know?
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My idea is that it is a lot, at least historically.
Do journalists and magazine writers count? Those authors surely do, and there are a lot of them.
What about the real textbook authors (often not the marquee name on the title page) employed by publishers? They should also count.
Do people who write software for their employers count? I'm one and certainly think I count. I even question whether I'm a fool.
As for fiction writers, one of my favorites, Anthony Trollope, did it. I have no idea how many others have made what seems to me a highly sensible decision to maximize shifting of risk from their person to a corporate entity. Maybe, selling all rights until copyright expiration is less common today. But there's nothing inherently wrong with it.
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Originally Posted by DiapDealer
It should be illegal to indefinitely retain the rights to an author's work that you have no intention of publishing.
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Are you thinking that a textbook company should have to keep publishing older editions? I don't see why.
If the author was paid (either by contract or an employment relationship) for rights until copyright expires, and paid fairly, there's nothing exploitive about that. Fairly paid authors don't need to be paid twice. In some countries it could raise a freedom of read issue for the old edition to be out of print, but libraries, and interlibrary loan, mean I can still read out of print works.
And, soon, no interlibrary loan will be needed. You are alluding to a problem that eBooks, and publishing on demand, are eliminating.
I fail to see the moral problem in selling all rights to what you write. Maybe that's because, as a software author, I'm doing it in my day job daily.