by PunditGuy | Sep 28, 2007 | Technology |
Each year I speak with hundreds of people working at publishing houses who are responsible for managing rights. After a typical conversation with them, I almost always come away with the same impression – rights people are busy and have a lot on their plate. To do their job effectively, they need to be organized and have information available to them at a moments notice. Unless they are endowed with a photographic memory, their ability to recall specific contract details is only as good as the database they use. And most publishing houses I’ve encountered have pretty good systems in place to track the important stuff. But the data they have becomes more limited the further back in time they go. I’m sure that’s why I end up being the type of call they are least able to handle. In my business, we make requests to license electronic rights to books published in 2007, books published in 1925 and every year in-between. Guess what contract data is readily available to most rights people?
I can expect to get a pretty quick answer to the question, “Can you let me know if electronic rights are available for a book published in 2005?” I might even get lucky on that question if I’m inquiring about a book published in 2000. Unfortunately, the further back in time I go the less likely I’m able to find out quickly about the rights status of a book. Here’s the type of answer I get from a rights manager when I ask about an “old” book — “Oh, of course the data is available. It’s just down stairs, in file boxes, in the cold, dark, dank basement. And did I mention that no one goes down there anymore?”
1999 to the present: digital sub-rights in your boilerplate
In this digital era, it pays to know what rights you have. And even more importantly, you need to be sure the books you publish today allow you the freedom to create as many flavors as possible. Any book deal you’ve signed in the last five years should already include rights to publish digitally. Be sure your boilerplate language is specific.
If a Picture Paints a Thousand… – license digital rights to photos, artwork, and EVERYTHING!
Be sure your standard contract includes not only e-book rights, but electronic version rights. What’s the difference? E-Books are merely facsimiles of the original print edition. This typically means that all of the content from the book is reproduced in the digital edition. PDF books, audio books, e-books on CD-ROM and those for handheld devices – these are some examples of what a run of the mill e-book is. But when your publishing house wants to exploit their copyrights digitally, why limit yourself to only e-books? By securing electronic version rights, you license the content that didn’t make it to the print edition, but rather ended up on the “cutting room floor”. Chances are it was left there because of reasons specific to the print edition. Those ‘left overs’ might lend themselves well to a digital version of the book which isn’t limited by the normal printed page constraint. Make sure you have the rights to use everything submitted by the author.
The Amendment Paper Trail – travel back in time to secure digital rights
But what about the books published before you had that catch all digital rights clause? Just because you don’t think a lot about these backlisted titles doesn’t mean they can’t be extremely valuable in digital form. Get your contract amendment language together and go treasure hunting. It pays to go back and revisit contracts for the best sellers of yester-year.
Yes, I know this is hard work requiring heavy resources and I don’t mean to minimize the task. The further back you go, the harder it will be to find authors and in some cases, their heirs. Orphaned works are appropriately named – there’s no one left who knows enough about the work to do anything with it and the lack of available data can look like a liability to a publishing house. Set investigative limits. If it looks like you might need to put weeks into the recovery of a copyright, be sure the time you put in equals the return you’ll receive.
Diamonds in the Rough – protect the perennial best sellers
The most logical backlisted books to go after are the best sellers, and I don’t mean just the ones that are in print. An out-of-print book published in 1985 might have stopped showing positive sales numbers by 1990, but that doesn’t mean life can’t be breathed back into the title today in a new digital edition. When a customer becomes a consumer of digital books, a funny thing happens. They tend to want to own a lot of digital books. And those aren’t just your front-list. They want digital editions of the books they loved as a child, or as a student in school. Much in the same way music lovers moved from LPs to cassettes to CD formats, often purchasing the same music over and over again, digital book buyers will be looking for backlisted titles. Guess what that means? Your new ‘digital’ customers can be your old ‘print’ customers. Be sure you have the rights to offer these new products to your lifelong customers.
by PunditGuy | Sep 26, 2007 | eBooks |
No, really.
When Satomi Nakamura uses her cellphone, she has to be extra careful to take frequent breaks. That’s because she isn’t just chatting. The 22-year-old homemaker has recently finished writing a 200-page novel titled “To Love You Again” entirely on her tiny cellphone screen, using her right thumb to tap the keys and her pinkie to hold the phone steady. She got so carried away last month that she broke a blood vessel on her right little finger.
“PCs might be easier to type on, but I’ve had a cell phone since I was in sixth grade, so it’s easier for me to use,” says Ms. Nakamura, who has written eight novels on her little phone. More than 2,000 readers followed her latest story, about childhood sweethearts who reunite in high school, as she updated it every day on an Internet site.
This is astonishing in so many ways. First, there is the reality that millions of twenty-something kids can type on cell phones better than on a keyboard. I have a hard enough time typing out a simple one line email on my iPhone. The age gap notwithstanding, that fact that legions of people are tapping out content on their mobile devices shouldn’t make it so amazing that real readable content is being generated. I suppose I just assumed that most of the cell phone content in the world read like this:
wd u lk 2 go W me 2 go gt <) 2nite?
And this cell phone book biz is the real deal. Sales of mobile-books are expected to double to $200 million this year. Two Hundred Million Dollars. Incredible.
Full story at the WSJ.
by PunditGuy | Sep 24, 2007 | eBooks |
I’ve never even picked up one of these books, but they’re hard to miss when you’re in the checkout line at your local grocery store. Today, Harlequin announced they’re going all e-book with over 120 titles published per month. That’s right – per MONTH!
Harlequin said yesterday that from this point forward it is making its complete frontlist catalogue available in e-book format. Active in the e-book marketplace since October 2005, with an initial publication schedule of nine titles a month, Harlequin will now be releasing more than 120 titles per month in both print and digital formats.
Harlequin’s e-books will be priced slightly lower than their print books and be available in Adobe, Microsoft Reader, MobiPocket, Palm and Sony formats. The company said it is launching this initiative because its customers embrace the immediacy and portability of the format and the titles do not go out of stock.
Smart move, especially for these types of books. I couldn’t think of a better category for consumer e-books than a quick read like a Harlequin title. Even more importantly, the category is consumed primarily by women, a demographic sorely needed in the e-booksphere.
by PunditGuy | Sep 20, 2007 | eBooks |
The massive bookstore chain announce today that they’ll be moving to ‘second base’ in their relationship with Sony’s e-book reader.
Borders is expanding its relationship with Sony, adding the technology company’s e-book reader to over 200 more of its superstores, while also agreeing to develop a co-branded store to facilitate e-book sales. Borders has been selling the Sony Reader in 270 of its superstore since last November and will now offer it for sale in more than 500 outlets. “We have been doing very well with it,” Borders spokesperson Anne Roman said of the Reader. The rollout to additional stores will begin in October.
So, how will all these new e-book reader readin’ crazies buy their e-books? Right there in the middle of their local Borders store, right?
Uh, not yet.
Starting next month, Borders will team with Sony to launch a new e-bookstore. Currently, e-book titles for the Reader can only be downloaded through Sony’s Connect online store. Borders’ outlets that now carry the Reader only have a demo unit in the store, and Roman said it was too early to say if stores will offer a way to directly order e-books from a store. She wouldn’t comment on whether the prototype stores now under development will enable customers to buy an e-book from the store, although such a feature seems likely.
Likely? Isn’t that what a bookstore does – sell books? They don’t sell paper and then require the user to go home and print a book on it, right? If Borders doesn’t get into the e-book selling business themselves, they’ll lose Sony Reader sales to the likes of Wal-Mart, Best Buy or any number of other big box retailers.
To increase the selection of e-books, Borders’ merchandise team will encourage large publishers to put more of their backlist in e-book format, and also urge mid-sized and small publishers to add e-books. Roman hopes that Borders’ support of the e-book market will convince publishers who have hesitated about getting into the format to get into the business.
This won’t happen if Borders limits their sales to the device only. Publishers already consider e-book customers to be a ‘geeks only’ club, and as long as that remains a universal truth, they won’t be spending big money to put a lot of their books in the format. In fact, I don’t believe publishers will really put their arms around ‘e’ versions of trade books until the devices become as ubiquitous as the iPod. And that’s only if they don’t repeat the mistakes made by their counterparts in the Record Industry.
by PunditGuy | Sep 19, 2007 | Copyright |
I often run across people who don’t know very much about copyright law. Typically they are honest people who wish to copy content for use in a new work of their own that will ultimately be distributed to the public. I’m always grateful when they call me first and ask “is this OK?” Unfortunately, a lot of folks don’t ask first, and end up unknowingly infringing copyright.
There are times when copyright ignorance runs the opposite direction. People claim copyright on property which itself isn’t copyrightable. Those are interesting conversations, I can tell you. It’s not fun to inform someone that they cannot own what they think they own. It’s a downer for them, for sure.
I thought about this today after reading this article on note-taking inside a bookstore. The president of a bookstore at Harvard took umbrage with students who were comparison shopping inside his store. The students would take their list of required book purchases into the shop, write down the ISBN for each title, then go home and use the identifier to see which online retailer offered the lowest prices. The president witnessed the students taking notes and asked them to leave the store. When confronted about this, the president stated that he considered the information to be the bookstore’s intellectual property. After taking the matter to an IP lawyer, the president found out a thing or two about his claim of copyright.
ISBN data is similar to phone book listings, which are not protected by IP law.
by PunditGuy | Sep 18, 2007 | eBooks |
I was amazed at the coverage this story received last week. According to numerous outlets, the International Digital Publishing Forum voted overwhelmingly to accept the Open Publication Structure 2.0 eBook specification as an official industry standard.
Ok, so, the question is, does the industry care? I’d like to meet a publishing executive who gets goose-bumps looking at this.
In all seriousness, do publishers really care about file formats? Don’t they care about making money? Isn’t their bottom line the issue that attracts most interest within a publishing house? Now look, I’m as glad as anyone that a group of techies can gather in a room and vote to agree that a .epub file is better than most. I’m sure Adobe loves them too. But I would think book publishers could benefit a whole lot more from industry leadership who helps educate the front liners out there on the merits of forming a sound electronic publishing strategy. A lot of folks are begging to know how to pull real dollars out of electronic publishing. A lot of folks are scared to death to commit big money toward full scale digitization (even though they must). Yes, it pays to know what kind of files to use, but better than that, it pays to know who the customer is, what they like to read, and how much money they’re willing to pay to do so electronically. That’s the kind of insight the industry really needs.
by PunditGuy | Sep 14, 2007 | Industry |
In a few weeks, I’ll be speaking at an event attended by book publishers, their management and go-to people. I’m excited about the opportunity, and I’m definitely looking forward to meeting my next customer. Problem is, it’s often easy to mess up a networking opportunity. After all, I’m not going just to hear myself talk. I’m going to share news about how business can be helped by the products we offer. It’s not enough to show up, sit in the back of the room, wait for my turn to speak, finish then hurry back to my hotel room. You gotta ‘press the flesh’, baby!
Here are some helpful hints (and reminders) on the art of networking. And it doesn’t hurt to stand out in a crowd either.
by PunditGuy | Sep 11, 2007 | General
Remember.
by PunditGuy | Sep 4, 2007 | General
According to ‘gypsy‘, Dick Cheney is about to blow up the Bay Bridge because the administration “desperately needs a terrorist attack in the near future”.
