Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Publishing contracts. They don't have any choice in the matter; they can't just tear up their existing contracts and pretend that they don't exist. You don't really think that they don't want to sell you books, do you?
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Absolutely. It's not the publishers (much), and it's not the authors (much). It's not even the agents really.
Even the agents are good guys - they're trying to get the most money they can out of publishers for their authors (& for their 15%).
The problem is that the whole lot of them haven't fully understood what ebooks require.
Exclusive regional contracts make sense for paper books, because paper is bulky and heavy, and expensive to ship around. So publishers in a certain area get an exclusive right to produce print versions of particular books. They're paying authors for that exclusive right, to be sure that they don't get stuck with a warehouse of expensive books, which could happen if the author could also give another publisher in the same country the right to print (say) a cheap paperback edition.
But this doesn't apply to ebooks. There's no natural barrier to sales, except language. For ebooks, non-exclusive world-wide rights make a lot more sense. Or exclusive world-wide rights for a particular language, although the former seems a better idea to me.
The problem at the moment is that publishers want to pay less for non-exclusive world-wide rights than they do for the current exclusive regional rights. And agents (& authors) want more for exclusive world-wide rights than for exclusive regional rights.
As I said, I hope that all parties concerned see that non-exclusive world-wide rights make the most sense. Publishers don't like it, as it means that they'll be competing against other publishers in their 'home' market.
Personally, I'd like to have the choice between the US and UK versions of (say) Harry Potter or Sookie Stackhouse. And competition would be good for consumers - not necessarily on price, but certainly on quality.
I suspect it'll be some years before it all gets sorted. I don't see regional restrictions on ebooks lasting in the long term (10 years) though.