Quote:
Originally Posted by Direct Ebooks
It is much more profitable currently for authors and their agents to sell their right to the highest bidder in each territory rather than to one publisher for worldwide rights. It is then up to the individual publisahers as to whether they make the books available in eBook formats.
This may not change anytime soon as the industry is so used to this model. What we may have though, is savvy authors selling the digital rights to their books to an internet based publiaher or retaining them for non-exclusive distribution themselves.
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If people can't legally get an ebook because of geo restrictions and therefore go to the darknet instead, this will directly hit publisher and author revenue, which may give some leverage to removing the restrictions; however the link between increased geo restrictions and increased piracy is likely to be very difficult to prove. Perhaps some time in the future piracy will become so bad that the legitimate market for ebooks in some regions will practically disappear, and may be this will lead to global contracts as it will no longer be worthwhile to draw up a contract that only covers a single region.