Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
Ah, ok.
As far as geo restrictions, as far as I know, there isn't anything in any treaty that forces it. It's simply a business matter that is enforced via contracts. There is nothing that keeps an author from signing a contract that gives world wide ebooks rights to a specific publisher. The only reason that an author wouldn't sign a world wide ebook contract is because that author had already signed a contract that gave the ebook rights in a specific location to someone else or the publisher wasn't interested in the world wide rights.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by j.p.s
That is not the only reason and may not be the primary reason.
A number of posters have mentioned numerous times that it is often more profitable for the author to divvy up ebook rights geographically than to grant exclusive world wide rights to a single publisher.
Maybe authors should consider granting, and publishers accepting, non-exclusive world wide ebook rights, or separating ebook rights from pbook rights.
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How many publishers have a world wide presence? Even with the consolidation in the publishing industry, there are few if any that have a presence in all English speaking countries. Even with pbooks, you run into quite a few situations where multiple publishers are required to cover the rights to books in multiple geographic areas (local example is Raincoast Books which has the Canadian rights to the Harry Potter pbooks as they represent Bloomsbury in Canada while Scholastic has the rights to the Harry Potter pbooks in the USA). The ebook rights are separate and assigned to Pottermore.