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Digital Book World: Will territorial sales become obsolete? An update on rights issues
January 25, 2011 | 3:21 pm
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By Paul Biba
Cullen Stanley, moderator, Janklow & Nesbit Associates; Jean Arache, Belfond & Presses de la Cite (Paris); Carolyn Savarese, Perseus; Andrew Franklin, Profile Books (London)
Arache: France is a fixed price digital market. Protecting the publishers and the bookshops, all with the approval of the government. Going to a fixed price for digital books controlled by publisher with no discounts. Digital files are always more expensive than the mass market paperback. French digital market is 1% or less, but larger in academic market. In France want to preserve territorial rights. In digital marketplace have a big opportunity in less known, such as regional, languages. Small sales but economics will let them be published. Don’t know how can block consumer from looking at prices from all around the world. Consumer is always is always the winner in the end, must show to the consumer that what you are selling is a different product. Have to protect author’s value from piracy and this is a big issue. The best way to do this is through a local publisher as a foreign vendor can never know all the rules. Territorial rights give you a better position to do this.
Savarese: Very hungry group of consumers out there. Should continue with the old ways of doing things, especially on the print side. A lot of books not getting to an audience who would be interested in reading them. Midlist publishing goes begging for licensing deals. In the digital world it makes selling easier for midlist titles because don’t have the burdens of the supply chain. Have to respect the partnerships we’ve always had. Some publishers will try to control international electronic digital rights, especially the big 6 in the US. Will be difficult to sustain that control with authors and agents. Biggest risk we have as publishers is to give the power of control to the tech companies because they don’t understand how a book is built. More and more publishers will want to control world English rights. Publishers have never explained to the consumer why this happens but the minute you say you have to explain you are alienating the consumer and reducing your market. Big new market is non-English speaking markets who want to read English books. The open market is only going to get more open because of digital. Better for publishers and most authors. Publishers are not going to give up international markets because need to earn back their investments and because digital publishing is not making enough money to offset the decline of the brick and mortar stores.
Franklin: no reliable figures out of Europe because Amazon dominant and doesn’t release figures. Takeup of Kindle in UK very good in last few months. Still under 1% of new titles. Have #1 Kindle ebook after Christmas and sold 21,000 copies in a week, but was a very special promotion. Disagree with Arache 100% as to what should be subject to territorial rights. Future of local, indigenous publishing is in crisis because is an expensive market and local consumers find they can get even hard cover books cheaper from overseas. Territories matter to protect local publishers. Typical sales of rights – copyright term – is silly in this era of fast change. Can’t tie up rights for 100 years in period of change. In open market forced to compete on price and this isn’t fair. In closed market can compete on other things. Open market is a legacy of the past and markets must be protected to protect the publisher and the author. Territorial right are necessary to protect the local publishers who are the repository and promoter of local culture, which might disappear if the local publisher disappears. Look at the crisis in Canada and Australia.
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All of that may be true, but ebooks are a global market. Based on the many complaints I read in the Kindle forums from non-US Kindle owners asking about why a particular book isn’t available or costs more, even the free ones, the high frustration will lead these people to sites that sell ebooks that aren’t constrained by location, VAT, and DRM. Like Smashwords for instance.
I think it also drives people towards piracy, the exact opposite of the publisher’s goal. There are lots of comments about how you can’t get such and such a book LEGALLY, hint, hint, wink, wink. The pirated copies are super easy to find as well.
The publishers are cutting off their noses to spite their faces by trying to control this. In a free market, all products would be available for sale to all markets without artificial barriers. Anything else creates a black market.
Shocking views from inside parts of the industry.
Publishers just don’t understand that mIRC, rapidshare, hotfile, bittorrent, and astatalk don’t have any territorial rights or restrictions. If you aren’t going to sell the book to me, then I am just going to get it for free. Too bad the content creators get screwed but they can thank their publishers and agents for that…
They are going to ‘protect’ the publisher and author right out of business! It seems very strange to me to complain about piracy causing lost sales when half the time, there couldn’t be a sale to lose because they turned the customer away. You can argue about the ‘morality’ of it all day long, but the bottom line if they fail to give the customer a viable option, the only thing they’ll be doing is training that customer to look for other options besides they themselves. That option could be the self-pubs or places like Baen. It could be watching television instead and giving up on books altogether. It could be Gutenberg, the public library, Mom’s bookshelf, getting the relative in the US to buy it and de-drm it and send it for them. Or it could be the darknet. And they;d have nobody to blame but themselves.
Joanna wrote: “They are going to ‘protect’ the publisher and author right out of business! ”
An excellent point to make Joanna. I find it utterly bewildering as someone involved in business for so many years involved in finding ways to sell more product to more people in more places.
Joanna wrote: “It seems very strange to me to complain about piracy causing lost sales when half the time, there couldn’t be a sale to lose because they turned the customer away.”
That’s the point. Ok, they have to find a way to try to protect local publishers, but that’s not the way. Information about our favourites authors is all around, if we know the book is out there we will be looking for it, and now there’re a lot of ways. Before e-books we have to look for it in special markets and catalogs, so less people were taking the effort to purchase it, but anyway there was always someone to import the material so you could purchase it. It was reserved for more especialized material than now because it was difficult, but the idea is the same.
The problem is not protecting local publishers, is protecting UK, Australian and Canadian market against US market for the big publishers, other territories are caught up in the middle.
If I could find the e-books I want in my country I would buy them from a local publisher, but no one is selling them, or they come late and translated. Sometimes the translation is OK, and I buy the e-book again if I liked it, but certain type of books I like to read… are much better read in the original language if you can.