Quote:
Originally Posted by starrigger
I can certainly get on board with the goals outlined in the original post. Finding effective ways to influence the market is a big challenge, and will probably require lots of small ways of applying leverage. Regarding publishers, I think positive efforts are more likely in the long run to bear fruit than negative. I.e., thousands of polite messages to publishers saying, "I'd really like to buy more of your books in well-formatted, DRM-free editions at a fair price" are more likely to engender change than thousands of angry emails saying, "What you're doing is driving me straight to the darknet."
[SNIP]
On new contracts, it's dicey. It's all well and good to say that authors should withhold their ebook rights. But most publishers now consider ebook rights to be a part of the package. And for most authors, having a publishing contract is far better than not having one. We may see pushback from the agents and authors on this, but that's apt to be a long struggle. Since the publisher has contributed its resources to the editorial quality of the book, not to mention marketing and promotion, they are not entirely unjustified in wanting the ebook benefits also. For the majority of writers, the better path is probably to work at getting better terms, and pushing their publishers to do the ebooks well.
One area that's ripe for growth is getting more authors to recognize the increasing importance of ebooks, and to understand the arguments in favor of doing away with DRM.
[SNIP]
Those are just some observations that I hope will be helpful. I have no great ideas on how to organize, but I'm sure others will.
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One interesting possibility for future contracts might be to negotiate selling exclusive eBook rights for only a limited time (one year? three?), with a change to non-exclusive rights there-after. Perhaps having the exclusive rights be geographically restricted, but making the non-exclusive be world-wide might make this attractive enough for the publishers to accept the idea. I can see it now: "Sure, you lose exclusivity on the bits after three years. But in exchange you get to sell the bits world-wide at that point instead of US-only."
An arrangement along these lines would allow authors to (eventually) either sell electronic editions themselves or contract with clueful electronic sellers sooner than is currently typical. And it would let readers get reasonably-priced electronic editions sooner than we do today.
Just a thought,
Xenophon