Unpredictability in the Future of Rights and e-Books

Might e-books force a wholesale re-thinking of the contract for books in all shapes and forms?  Emily Williams, co-chair of the BISG Rights Subcommittee, wrote last Friday on the uncertainties and issues in the future of e-books and copyright on Digital Book World.  From the publishing perspective, she writes:

“Publishers are now strenuously making the argument that ebooks are like paperbacks, a primary right, and they cannot create a publishing strategy for a title without controlling rights to both print and digital.  Some agents and independent e-publishers, meanwhile, foresee a future in which ebooks are just one more right to carve out, like audiobooks, to sell to the print publisher at a price or to an independent digital house. But around the edges of debates about the old model, a new possibility is arising.”

And from the possibly more innovative perspective, she writes:

“What if ebooks force a wholesale re-thinking of the contract for books in all shapes and forms?

The argument goes something like this: in entering the ebook world we’re moving from the most stable and mature market for creative works that exists — the 500-year-old print book market — into the vast unknown. It makes no sense to demand that an author turn over rights to the publisher for the rest of his or her life plus 70 years when no one can tell what the market might look like 10 or 20 years from now. On the other hand, if the agent is too aggressive limiting what rights are granted with an eye to what might happen in the future, the publisher has no room to experiment and innovate.

One approach is a generous rights grant limited by clauses that force a renegotiation after a few years or in the event of a general market shift, and many agents are now doing this.  But this approach fails to contemplate the possibility that ebooks may provoke severe disruption in the market causing publishers and booksellers to crack under the pressure of disappearing margins, remaking the book world in the ebook’s image, on an altogether less physical plane, and leaving the path a book takes from author to reader unalterably changed.

This is the world the revolutionaries dare to contemplate, and in anticipation they have written a new kind of book contract.”