Enhanced ebook rights are those that offer multimedia content such as video. These are opposed to the usual “verbatim” rights that publishers obtain. Advances in display technology are making enhanced rights more valuable to publishers and authors alike, leading to some conflict between the two.
The Bookseller has an article on this today, and says that some publishers try to get the enhanced rights on a case by case basis, and other publishers try to get them all the time. In addition there are those publishers who are taking the position that “enhanced” rights are included with the normal ebook rights.
Jim Gill of United Agents said the enhanced e-book “seems to us an all-encompassing category that some publishers are seeking to throw a rope around at the moment, potentially covering anything from incidental music with an e-book edition or author interviews, right out to highly designed and produced iPhone applications.”
He said while some basic enhancements might be covered by an existing grant of e-book rights, “beyond that we’re talking about very sophisticated products which don’t resemble at all what we’d all understand to be ‘a book’ licensed under a volume-rights agreement”. Gill added United Agents would “no sooner naturally sell those rights to a book publisher than we’d sell them film right
For more info also see our report Publishing Expo: Rethinking author contracts for the digital world.
