Quote:
Originally Posted by Pushka
Contracts that are being signed NOW will have this flexibility incorporated into them, then just as blogs, online forums are being built into business models, so will the ebook and its distribution be built into the book contract. But ebooks are a NEW thing to the majority of the population and this is a transition period. But doing stuff like this is simply crap.
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Commercial ebooks have been around for more than 10 years. Authors and their agents who didn't bother to assert some kind of control over them in their contracts, weren't paying attention to a major upcoming aspect of publishing.
And I'm sorry if they get hurt by the public's attempts to get ebooks sold the way they want to read them. But no author is forced to sign a contract; they choose--and if all the major publishers are demanding control over ebook distribution, authors get to choose between control & publicity.
I don't blame them for choosing publicity & the income that goes with it, but I also don't have much sympathy when they get caught by a campaign that doesn't like the way their chosen publisher does business. (And authors who are "devastated" by Amazon 1-star reviews definitely need a thicker skin. Some people leave 1-star reviews on anything their ex-girlfriend liked.)