Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney
Which may be beginning to happen. But it leads to a thorny question.
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I agree, but it's a market question, with a market solution. Book contracts will shift and twitch for a while and then settle back in around some kind of "norm". Authors and agents are already paying attention to e-rights. They have been since Tasini v. NYTimes. They'll just have to do some tweaking to the rights reversion clause. Personally, I don't think anything makes sense but a strict time limit for e-rights.
Print rights have a built-in milestone that the publisher has to cross to keep a book in print, that being another print run. That milestone requires a certain level of commitment from the publisher. E-rights don't have one, and the old phrases like "substantial effort to promote and sell the book" just don't make sense in e-.