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. Going “Deeper Than Just the Glow of...
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Rights
Daily Digest for September 7, 2010
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...
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Rethinking Contracts and Copyrights – Free Webcast
Not surprisingly, e-book publishers have been in the vanguard of offering new terms to authors, often as a way of competing against established print houses. In a manifesto on his blog, Richard Nash, the former publisher of print indie Soft Skull, laid out his own version of the change principle: “The publishing industry is...
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Google Exec to Keynote Publishing Business Virtual Conference
Mark Nelson , Strategic Partner Manager at Google, will be interviewed live during Publishing Business VIRTUAL Conference & Expo Sept. 16 at 10:15 a.m.-11:15 a.m. ET The interview will focus on “Google Editions,” Google’s forthcoming service that will allow users to buy digital copies of books discovered through Google’s book search, and enable book...
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Cory Doctorow Reports On His DRM Negotiations
Cory Doctorow provided an update on his DRM negotiations on Boing Boing yesterday. Excerpt below, and full text here. “My August Publishers Weekly column reports in on my experiment to see which of the major ebook stores would carry my books without DRM, and with a text disclaimer at the beginning that released readers...
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E-readers in China – Many Manufacturers, Few Rights
Emma House, Trade and International Director for the Publishers Association, recently attended the Beijing Book Fair, and reported on the proliferation of e-reader manufacturers, and the relatively few options for rights management. She writes: “There are around 40 to 50 hardware manufacturers of ebook readers here in China. Unlike the Western markets, the Chinese...
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From Random House/Wylie Detente, a New Royalty Rate Emerges
News that Random House had “won” its showdown with The Wylie Agency, over the inclusion of titles by RH authors in Wylie’s backlist digital publishing imprint Odyssey Editions, spread quickly through publishing circles last week, after joint statement released by Random House and Wylie. The statement said that Random House will now be the...
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Are There Technical Solutions to Problems in the Printing Industry?
Debate on how technology will impact the role of the literary agent is taking place at the annual GigaOM Pro Bunker Series. Particularly interesting from a rights and royalties perspective is the potential for disintermediation in publishing. “We publish a lot of….dreck. I’m actually really proud of that because it should not be the...
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Beijing Book Fair – Will Western Publishers Profit in China?
The Beijing International Book Fair, which runs through September 3rd, is attracting an increasingly global audience, as the Chinese book market continues to boom. Two questions are most relevant this year: What will happen with the e-book market in China (sales of ebooks and digital products hit 80 billion RMB ($11.8 billion) in 2009...
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Shatzkin on Royalty Math
Mike Shatzkin‘s run the numbers comparing e-book royalties to hardcovers, to trade paperbacks, and to mass-market paperbacks, and how they work out under both the wholesale and the agency models (with the author getting 25% of net and with the author getting 40% of net). By Shatzkin’s admission, this is a “just the facts,...
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