images[1] The Bookseller has another piece on the Publishers Association and the importance of territorial sales controls. (A couple of days ago, I covered the Publishers Association’s decree that libraries should stop lending e-books remotely due to territorial transgressions, and also Waterstone’s ending overseas e-book sales.) This time, the target is Amazon, which a Bookseller investigation revealed to have relatively lax territorial enforcement.

Richard Mollett, PA chief executive, spoke out against online retailers with weak territorial controls for e-books.

Mollet stressed the “great importance” of the controls. He said: “Undermining territoriality goes against our copyright law and against the terms of the contract the UK publisher has with the author. Everybody loses out.”

Really? Everybody loses out? How does anybody lose out when a consumer can buy an e-book that isn’t available locally? The consumer gets what he wants; the publisher and the author get paid. Well, I suppose whoever holds the rights in that consumer’s region loses out (if that party even exists), but if they wanted to earn that consumer’s money, they should have made the e-book available locally where the consumer could buy it more easily. People don’t usually look for stuff on foreign stores first.

Mollet does at least pay lip service to consumers—

The priority, he said, was to improve consumer experience of buying e-books online. “We are keen to discuss arrangements with Amazon and other online retailers and we have an open dialogue with them to ascertain what would be the best solution for these online territoriality issues while also improving consumer experience, which is the ultimate priority for us all.”

—but when you get right down to it, he didn’t actually say anything of substance. He just used about half of a buzzword bingo card’s worth of corporate jargon to say “We want to talk to Amazon about making things better.” Not a word about what consumers might expect to gain out of all this, beyond the warm fuzzy feeling of knowing that e-book vendors are going to play by publishers’ asinine licensing restrictions.

To be fair, Mollet probably believes what he’s saying, and it’s not really his job to look out for consumers—industry associations watch out for the interests of their own industry first and foremost, and publishers still consider distributors and other regional publishers to be their clients. But to consumers, this all sounds a lot like the “Let them eat cake” remark commonly misattributed to Marie Antoinette.

I wonder what form madame la guillotine will take for publishers?

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19 COMMENTS

  2. “I wonder what form madame la guillotine will take for publishers?”

    BitTorrent, while IRC and Usenet sit to one side and knit.

    Free tip for people in the publishing industry: making it difficult or impossible for people to pay you for the products you distribute isn’t a terribly viable long-term business strategy.

  3. Who are those people from publishers association?
    I do not understand how is the final customer supposed to benefit from this.
    What do you think happens when people in Poland, Albania, Romania, Germany, can’t purchase their English books legally? At the very least they stop purchasing. How is that supposed to be beneficial for Authors, or Agents or Publishers or anyone? More realistic scenario is that all those people will ramp up their pirating activities. How is that going to be beneficial for anybody?

    Publishers do not realise that there are LOTS of people outside any of those nicely divided territories. I know, only a small fraction of people in any given non-English-speaking country read books in English, but those numbers add up. I am pretty sure that Amazon could provide those … aehm … “experts” from publishers association with interesting numbers.

  5. It’s also amusing (and frustrating) to see a number of titles by American writers like John O’Hara & Jim Thompson available as ebooks in the UK but not in the US. There are even a couple by Stephen King (Pet Sematary, Danse Macabre) available for Kindle in the UK, but not in the US. Won’t even get started on the selection of English writers like Roald Dahl & Somerset Maugham available as ebooks in the UK but not in the US.

    Kinda makes you wonder who’s smoking what.

    Bests to all,

    –tr

  6. **Authors lose if their right to sell a book in another market is stolen by Amazon and a publisher who didn’t pay for that right.

    Rights are contractual, not up for grabs by anyone who wants them, and if they are grabbed illegally on a large scale, no other publisher will touch them.**

  7. **Authors and publishers win when they successfully train customers to look to file-sharing networks for new books after prospective buyers get tired of repeatedly being told their money isn’t good enough.**

  9. There is no apparently about it. The author not only loses considerably more cash than she would make on sales: she loses control over her own work.

    Amazon is notorious for this form of sneaky theft with its attempt to grab text-to-speech rights with the Kindle as well as this new geographic rights issue.

  10. “There is no apparently about it. The author not only loses considerably more cash than she would make on sales: she loses control over her own work.”

    this assumes the author can sell in those extra markets which is an unwarranted assumption; with a deal in hand and publication dates fixed, yeah, maybe, but otherwise sounds like “bird in the sky” better than “bird in hand”

    and there are other arguments; say if you have an US edition with a major publisher, well that requires an amount of sales that is relatively high, so yes getting an UK or other foreign edition may give you immediately more money, but as ebooks gain market share, the extra sales by allowing your US edition to be sold everywhere may get your numbers high enough to publish the next book with the majors too, so the equation could turn : split rights and get more money now but lose your next book’s contract vs global rights, less money now but next book gets a contract

    So not that simple imho

  12. Ok. From what I gather from this discussion is:
    Point of view of people that think this is a good idea:
    1. Author sells rights to print the book and sell e-book on American market to USA publisher. [s]he receives an advance and then will receive money for each book sold.
    2. Author then approaches publisher from UK to sell them rights to print sell e-book in UK. Author receives ANOTHER advance and then is paid for each book sold.
    3. The rest of the world, many millions of expats, or people that simply like to read in English can go and screw themselves.

    BUT.
    In most cases, unless you are Stephen King, or Joanne Rowling, you have to “earn out” the advance, before you start getting paid for each book sold. So if you receive $3000 advance and your contract gives you $3 for each book (list price $30) you have to sell at least 1000 books before you see any additional money from royalties.

    A) If you restrict your book to USA and UK you get some money up front.
    B) If you let publisher sell your e-books worldwide, you get less money up front, but you can expect more money in royalties because the number of people that can buy your book is much greater.

    We would need to ask somebody, like Smashwords or Baen what percentage of their customers come from USA, UK and the rest of the world.
    We could also ask Fictionwise, how much business they did before they were forced to do geographical restriction and after that. Just go to the mobilerad.com and look up fictionwise in discussion. It is not a pretty picture.

  13. It just demonstrates to me how ill prepared the Publishers Association is for the new realities. They still haven’t learned that the customer is always right. Even if the PA is right (which I don’t believe they are) it doesn’t matter because the majority of their customers say they are wrong.

    You can’t hide geographic restrictions from customers and make it acceptable. People travel too often. The more you enforce it the more people you piss off. If you implement it to loosely enough to not impact consumers, why impact it at all?

    The future contracts have to change. Adapt or die. Obviously the PA has selected option two.

  15. Someone puts a date-rape drug in your drink then lets anyone who will pay have your body. You wake up, he gives you a percentage of the profit, and he and all your rapists think that makes it perfectly acceptable.

    Sure, that’s a gross exaggeration of territorial theft of books, but most of you don’t get it. Money is involved, but control is involved as well. The writer should have the power to say yes or no to what territories her book is in. She should have the right to negotiate.

    Just because you are getting your jollies out of it doesn’t make it right.

  16. Marylinn a writer should have rights I agree fully. However with those rights come repercussions. The exercise of geographical rights in the eBook sector is clearly and evidently frustrating readers all over the world, and it will result in massive piracy and no matter what the industry tries to do – no matter what they persuade governments to do there is not a single thing that can stem that tide.
    Writers and publishers need a cold slap to wake them up to the impact their actions are taking will have on their business. They think that sticking with the current model and somehow solving the distribution bottleneck in countries where purchases currently cannot be made is going to solve it. It won’t.

  17. In most cases, particularly with the big publishers, the writer has to agree to the geographic restrictions or lose a sale. Selling your book in a big market is about impossible, and most of the income is from paper sales so authors grit their teeth and agree to the ebook restrictions.

    It’s easy to be arrogant or dismissive about what a writer should and shouldn’t do when it’s not your money and career on the line.

    In the publishing trade press, I see that the big publishers are finally beginning to understand the importance of wide territorial rights, and things are beginning to change in the direction you want it, but it will take a long time for such a massive change because of contractual obligations with everyone from the author and distributors involved.

    Also, as I said, paper books are where the money is, and it will remain that way for years to come so that massive change isn’t imperative until ebooks begin to close the gap.

    The threat of piracy if things don’t change is an idle threat. Books with no geographic boundaries are pirated just as much as those which are closed. Most pirates steal because they can and because they believe that they must have what they want when they want it even if it is illegal.

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