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Originally Posted by DawnFalcon
Sorry, I disagree. Publishers should not be buying books today without worldworld right agreements for online publishing, even if they have to settle for non-exclusive rights.
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How would you expect non-exclusive rights to work?
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And they should be going back through the back catalogue and getting assigned online rights whereever possible and not explictly set otherwise, which is someone an academic author friend tells me they are still not doing (indeed, he has recovered the worldwide online rights for his works very cheaply indeed).
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This is a subset of a much older problem applicable to pbooks as well as ebooks.
Years back, I attended a talk given by Dave Hartwell, who was then a consulting editor at New American Library's Signet PB imprint. (These days, he's a Senior Editor at Tor.) Signet wanted to enhance its SF line. Dave described it taking something like seven months just to determine what existing SF properties Signet had under contract, and another five moths to dot Is, cross Ts, and make sure contracts were renewed. At that, they lost some titles they'd prefer to have kept because they might have forgotten they had the rights, but the author or author's agent didn't, and promptly asked that the rights revert as soon as the book reached out-of-print status.
I haven't seen a lot of evidence the publishing industry has gotten much better about this...
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For the rest of it, they should be talking about revenue sharing and cooperation for the remainder of their catalogues. They're not, they're talking restrictions and DRM. This is the sound of the music industry's ghost stalking them, and it will reflect on all books, losing buyers.
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How do you see revenue sharing and cooperation working?
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Dennis