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Think readers were Gemstar‘s biggest victims? That honor may belong to certain small publishers–now the targets of obnoxious legal efforts from Gemstar. Here’s an e-mail I received today from Scott Schmidt, publisher of Salvo Press:

Enjoyed your article on Gemstar. Salvo Press signed with the old Nuvomedia (Rocket) and saw a constant decline ever since Gemstar took over. I liken Gemstar to millipedes. They shot themselves in the foot far too much for mere bipods. Anyway, the kicker this week was they sent us a letter first by fax and later by certified mail wanting us to sign a contract release because we did not continue to convert all of our titles to the various Gemstar formats. (Conversion to Gemstar was the most difficult of all eBook formats, and our contract did not require us to give them all of our titles.) BTW, this contract release would be retroactive to December 31, 2002. They must have thought I was brain-dead enough to sign it. That’s typical Gemstar. I only hope other small publishers did not sign.

Salvo continues to produce eBooks in Adobe PDF, Microsoft Reader, Palm, and Hiebook.

The nerve of Gemstar! Yes, it would be nice for as many titles as possible to be out in all formats–but not at the expense of small publishers’ solvency!

This is a good example of why I’m so gung ho on a standardized e-book format at the consumer level. Publishers should get into their arm-twisting mode and tell the Open eBook Forum: “Live up to your promises of five years ago, or we’re outta here.” We already know how fondly the AAP’s top lawyer-lobbyist views the proprietary-format mess. The OeBF had better decide: Is it around to promote the prosperity of the e-book business in general, or just that of Microsoft, Adobe, OverDrive, Palm and the like? At the very least, OeBF needs to do a practical consumer-level format that could be a fallback like .rtf.

(Salvo letter reproduced with permission. I welcome similar correspondence from other publishers. Please tell me if it’s OK to quote you.)

 
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