shatzkin11_thumb1[1] Publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin’s latest blog post talks about the potential for a European market developing for US e-books, given that many Europeans are comfortable reading in English even if it is not their native language. Shatzkin barely touches on matters of territorial rights, however:

It is also true that many US publishers own rights that have been pretty much unexploited outside the United States. Although agents do their best to prevent it, sometimes publishers have enough leverage with the advance they’re paying to control global rights to English and even foreign language rights as well. Since those rights are more easily acquired in situations where the author has less leverage, either because the book’s potential is deemed small or because the author sold — with or without an agent — to a smaller publisher, they are often unexploited. Every publisher (and agent) knows that they fail to sell rights offshore in circumstances where they wanted to, tried to, and failed to.

Say what, Mike? If publishers can “control global rights to English” then why aren’t more e-books available in English all over the globe? Oh, wait, you said only “sometimes”. (More on that later.)

He talks about how export of books to Europe has been an area where American publishers were weak compared to UK publishers, due to the presence of significantly more water between us and them, but e-books offer a chance for us to catch up—especially since many of the more popular e-reading platforms are starting to go global.

Shatzkin seems to think the biggest obstacle to e-books making it in Europe is title selection, exacerbated by the problem of EPUB editions not existing for languages other than English. Though given the previously mentioned willingness of a lot of Europeans to read in English, that means the American e-book industry has something of a head start in that regard.

He writes:

Although the big US publishers have been both digitizing and putting rights metadata into their files for some time, there could still be backlist titles for which ebook opportunities could be exploited in Europe (and elsewhere) that haven’t made the “cut” for conversion. There has been no reliable data compiled that I’m aware of as to how much of the backlist in big houses has been digitized, but it isn’t 100% anywhere. The anecdotal evidence about how thoroughly the big publishers have researched and recorded their digital rights is conflicting — many have certainly put resources against the challenge — but there are certainly mid-sized, smaller, and acquired publishers who might now have an additional justification to do the same.

That’s all well and good, Mike, but do publishers really have the English-language rights for non-English-speaking countries? Even you admitted (in my first blockquote) that publishers only control global English rights “sometimes”.

I find it hard to believe that if there aren’t even English-language e-book editions of popular books (such as the new John Le Carré title I mentioned earlier today) for Canada, where it’s (mostly) the native language, that there can readily be German or Swiss ones without some serious rights renegotiation.

2 COMMENTS

  1. The good news for publishers is that there’s already a pretty healthy market for English-language e-books in Europe.

    The bad news for publishers is that it’s primarily being serviced by file-sharing networks, since the publishers refuse to allow Europeans (and Canadians, and Antipodeans, and…) to buy their e-books legally. (It’s possible to get around the publisher-mandated regional restrictions on e-bookstores, but it takes a lot less work – and less technical know-how – to just download a copy; depending on local laws, it may also be legal, or at least a much less serious offense, to download a book rather than to engage in the kind of obfuscation involved in making a “legitimate” purchase).

The TeleRead community values your civil and thoughtful comments. We use a cache, so expect a delay. Problems? E-mail newteleread@gmail.com.