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Originally Posted by Thasaidon
1. Steve if you wish examples do the research. Check the Mobilread forums and GIYF
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Like this?
similar publisher drops backlist site:.mobileread.com
Nothing relevant comes up. And if it did, then we'd have to see how much evidence there is for what sounds to me an implausible claim. Is this coming from true industry insiders, or disgruntled authors? How would you measure the similarity of two books claimed to be such? I think that with fiction, absent plagarism, and absent strong evidence from industry insiders, you can't.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Thasaidon
2. You have brought up biographies, not me.
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I did, while saying I have no evidence it has actually happenned even in a realm where it is actually possible to measure whether two books are similar.
I think that the nefarious reason you give is why books go out of print is mistaken -- except with textbooks, where they obviously do quickly go out of print.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Thasaidon
I did not say authors should be not be able to sell rights outright. I said I think publishers should lose the copyright to a book if it is out of print and not available in any form for a fixed period (e.g. say 5 years). Not a particularly onerous restriction to keep something available with today's ebooks.
Please read my posts more carefully as I am getting tired of typing "I did not say that".
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OK. Your position then is that author's should be able to sell their rights outright
with one exception that you don't find onerous but that you think is important to publishers. My postion is that the author should be able to sell all the rights.
We both agree that publishers make money by taking books off the market even though they are still profitable. I think they just do this with textbooks. You think they do this with novels (and maybe textbooks too -- I don't know.)
You proposal will significantly reduce the incomes of the authors listed on title pages of textbooks, because it destroys the model when there are frequent new editions. Knowing that the author will, in five years, undercut the publisher price, the textbook publishers may refuse to credit authors, significantly reducing their incomes. As for novelists, it won't make much difference to their average incomes one way or the other. Publishers will just keep novels in print longer that probably aren't earning out advances anyway.