Quote:
Originally Posted by Good Old Neon
Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
I guess my next question would be, how is it skewed against the creators?
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I am interested primarily in books so I do not follow that closely similar discussion about music or Mickey and I would leave others to answer that.
But in books, well check the latest contracts that big houses try to impose demanding that authors take even less in royalties for ebooks than for p-books which is so ridiculous from all points of view; check all the examples of books being skipped by bookstores on the distribution side...
The examples of digital "hate" among major publishers - maybe "hate" is the wrong word but that's the impression they give in so many little and big ways whatever their words say - are too numerous to count.
See Tor and free ebooks for a recent one that was so uncalled for considering the publisher started it all
Maybe I am spoiled, but I started in ebooks essentially because Baen was doing them and offered webscriptions before print date and later e-arcs way before print date, and they are doing it just perfectly in terms of samples, terms, prices, the way they treat their authors who make good royalties on ebooks. And they do well financially too, just had a NYT bestseller
So starting with that I came to expect this kind of ebook treatment and some years ago when I was an ebook newbie still, and an author claimed on his website that the publisher *contractually* had forbidden him to display more than a page or two from his latest book which got skipped by a major chain too btw, I was first shocked and then it just disgusted me.
Baen does roughly 25% of the book for free on their site, 3 months before pub date, gives out snippets way before pub date, and this guy could not put more than 2 pages from his book? WTF???? And is not as the publisher would offer samples anywhere...
Since then, well I found out that Baen is an outlier and the example above is just common if not worse...