Will POD Change Book Contracts?
Posted by: Lisa in Book Publishing News, The Book Business, Web & TechHere’s a sign that publishers are beginning to rethink their business model in the face of new methods of book promotion and distribution: the Author’s Guild isn’t happy with a change in the standard book contract at Simon & Schuster, effectively granting the publisher rights to a book well beyond the point when a book would, under most current contracts, be considered out of print. (Rights to out-of-print books normally revert to the author.) S&S now wants to retain rights if the book remains available in any form, including digitally or via print-on-demand.
Chances are they’ll come to some sort of compromise in this case, but it signals the beginning of a inevitable restructuring of the legal and financial relationship between publisher and author in the age of the internet and print-on-demand. Something to keep an eye on.
Check out GalleyCat for a good summary of the situation and industry reaction.
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May 22nd, 2007 at 4:13 pm
What this means is simply that any agent who isn’t a moron will negotiate time-limited contracts. In the war boardgame industry (admittedly a tiny niche compared to book publishing), contract language along the lines of “if the game is not published by date X, or goes out of print for at least Y amount of time, then the rights revert to the designer” is standard.
May 22nd, 2007 at 4:15 pm
Hit submit too quickly. The sort of language I’d expect in a book contract of this nature would be something like “S&S retains the publishing rights to book X until it goes out of print (not counting downloads and POD) or date Y, whichever comes later.”
May 22nd, 2007 at 4:17 pm
That’s exactly the problem: such language has always been standard in book contracts. Agents have never had to “negotiate” for it. A book goes out of print, and the author is entitled to a reversion of rights.
What’s making people nervous about this development at Simon & Schuster is the idea that a publisher can say a book isn’t out of print, even if they’re printing only an extremely small number of print-on-demand copies.
May 22nd, 2007 at 4:24 pm
In response to your second comment: the language outside of parentheses is already in every book contract. The part in parentheses is what S&S wants to make part of the definition of “in print” in their new boilerplate contract. And if it’s their boilerplate, every agent won’t be able to negotiate out of it.
What they’ll have to do to please the Author’s Guild and agents is specify a minimum number of copies that must be printed within some time period in order for the book to be considered “in print.” Whatever happens, other publishers are sure to follow their lead eventually… but they’ll probably wait to see how this plays out.