Daily Digest for September 7, 2010
All the News Affecting Rights, Royalties, Royalty Software, or Rights Management for September 7, 2010:
A Four-Part Series on How Publishing Will Adapt, now that “the big stones have been moved” in technology, the short list for the Booker Prize, plus McMillan pushing for lower e-book royalties.
Booker Prize Contenders Shortlisted to Six Titles
Macmillan Pushes for Lower E-book Royalties; Bookstore Numbers Down in Germany, US
Going “Deeper Than Just the Glow of Technological Changes: We Need to Adapt to the Modern Information Age.”
Kent Anderson opens a four-part series on The Scholarly Kitchen today, with his piece Let The Adaptations Begin! The series will address various issues relating to rights and royalties technology.
Anderson wrights:
“The big rocks have been moved. The network is in place, wireless is abundant, devices have proliferated, media have been absorbed (moving pictures, still pictures, sound, text, and interaction), and people have connected. The rest of the physical work is going to be about landscaping and sifting, not long sessions with the backhoe.
But if the changes to the infrastructure are largely known in their direction (networked information), scale (huge), and aspects (social/devices/mobile/collaborative), the challenge becomes, “What do we do now?”
The series, to be continued tomorrow, Thursday, and Friday, will include installations by will touch on the following points:
- Will editorial creativity become an emphasis (and I don’t mean writing style)?
- Will editors finally begin working with electronic publishing platforms rather than using “print as an input”?
- Will online advertising finally claim its crown as more important than print?
- Will creativity be directed at the networked information possibilities rather than at static, print-like designs, layouts, and form factors?
- Will publishing a comment be equated to publishing a letter to the editor in every possible dimension?
- Will universities begin to look at substance instead of form (e.g., would running an excellent blog count as much toward tenure as publishing a single review article in a mid-tier journal)?
- Will journalists stop being brow-beaten by economics, poor management, and outmoded technologies and take the reins?
Booker Prize Contenders Shortlisted to Six Titles
The Booker Prize is down to six shortlisted titles, and the winner will be named October 12. In the meantime, US rights to Howard Jacobson’s book have been picked up Bloomsbury USA, which will publish on September 23.
Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America (Faber and Faber)
Emma Donoghue, Room (Picador)
Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room (Atlantic Books)
Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury)
Andrea Levy, The Long Song (Headline Review)
Tom McCarthy, C (Jonathan Cape)
In other awards, China Miéville’s The City & The City and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl tied for the Hugo Award for best novel.
Complete list of winners
The inaugural Penguin Prizes for African Writing went to Pius Adesanmi’s You’re Not a Country, Africa! for nonfiction, and Ellen Banda-Aaku’s Patchwork for fiction.
Macmillan Pushes for Lower E-book Royalties; Bookstore Numbers Down in Germany, US
From Publisher’s Perspective:
Publishers Marketplace broke the news earlier today of a new contract being pushed out by Macmillian to agents in the United States that asserts the company will only offer a 20% royalty rate for e-books, down from the typical 25% and would be applicable to “all exploitation of the content of the book in digital form.” Agent Richard Curtis, who posted the letter from Macmillan’s John Sargent to his blog, suggested to the New York Times that the move was entirely in the wrong direction: “The point is whether we should be playing on such a low ballfield at all and whether the industry should not really be thinking about a 50 percent royalty of net receipts.”
A survey conducted by buchreport reveals that the number of bookstore branches in Germany is decreasing for the first time in several years. The number is down 3% this year to 945 and has mostly affected small specialty shops in the DBH Group, which closed several Weltbild and Wohlthat branches. Overall selling space for the survey group increased by only 1.2% (as opposed to the previous year when that increase was +13%). Book chains are also filling more of their space with non-book products like gifts and DVDs.
Meanwhile, in the United States, Publishers Weekly reports that Barnes & Noble—the largest bookstore chain in the United States—anticipates that the large format bookstores will shrink in coming years. All the company’s B. Dalton stores will be closed by January and company COO Mitch Klipper said during a recent earnings conference call, “There are 1,500 superstores now, there won’t be 1,500 five years from now.”
