Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
The problem is entirely down to contracts between authors and publishers — nothing else. So we need be encourage authors and publishers to make better contracts when it comes to ebooks.
What would be a better contract? I think we all agree that geographical restrictions make little sense when applied to an ebook. So a better contract would be one that, even if it has geographic restrictions on paper books, have world-wide ebook rights to the publisher.
But, publishers are going to be increasing unlikely to want to buy just the paper rights to a book, and you can have two publishers each with exclusive world-wide rights. So ebook rights in new contracts would have to be non-exclusive world-wide rights.
And then publishers could compete for ebook sales fairly. And it wouldn't just be price differentiating the ebooks. There's quality of formatting, and translations too. Yes, translations - even between UK/US. A surprising number of UK books get translated for the US market - even the Harry Potter books. (It wasn't just the title that got changed!)
Could this work? Well, as usual when it comes to ebooks, Baen provides the example. All their ebook contracts are for world-wide, NON-exclusive rights.
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- let publishers compete on quality and price - not on the contracts they are able to manufacture to split the world