Gardner Dozois’ Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies coming as e-books

[DrNefario]

Originally Posted by BenG

With anthologies in general "best" often means the best they can get the rights for and is within their budget.

I don't think it's all that difficult or expensive to get short story reprint rights. These anthologies are pretty well-regarded, and do represent the editors' tastes, as far as I can tell.

[Blue Tyson]

Quite a few are already available and have been for a while

the UK edition is the Mammoth Book of Best New SF - new one would be 24, so some of these are available where US corresponding edition is not, etc.

[charlesatan]

Originally Posted by DrNefario

I don't think it's all that difficult or expensive to get short story reprint rights. These anthologies are pretty well-regarded, and do represent the editors' tastes, as far as I can tell.

First off, these anthologies have a budget, and it's a reasonable budget for a) short stories and b) reprinting them. What's more of a constraint here isn't the budget for paying the contributors, but the budget for the book itself: page count and how many stories the anthology can include (which was a big consideration for print books). So the editor might want to include three novellas and six short stories, but only has room for two novellas and ten short stories.

Second, acquiring rights is actually the more difficult part. Contacting the author and/or their estate can be a problem. (Not so much for new authors, but it can be a problem for foreign rights, etc.). Or there might be reasons why the story isn't available (contractual reasons) other than payment. And this is actually the bigger hurdle when it comes to reprinting these old anthologies. I don't know how Gardner did it, but most of the rights associated with the anthologies were for print rights, and they'd have to renegotiate for eBook rights. (This is easier for newer anthologies as the clause is now included in the original contract.)