Top Authors Make eBook Deal, Bypassing Publishers

RobotRunAmok writes "Home to 700 authors and estates, from Philip Roth to John Updike, Jorge Luis Borges, and Saul Bellow, the Wylie Agency shocked the publishing world yesterday when it announced the launch of Odyssey Editions. The new initiative is selling ebook editions of modern classics, including Lolita, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Updike's Rabbit tetralogy, exclusively via Amazon.com's Kindle store, leaving conventional publishers out of the picture. The issue boils down to who holds digital rights in older titles published before the advent of ebooks, with publishers arguing that the ebook rights belong to them, and authors and agents responding that, if not specifically granted, the digital rights remain with the author. Publishers and authors are also at loggerheads over the royalty that should be paid for ebooks: authors believe they should be getting up to double the current standard rate of 25%, because ebooks are cheaper to produce than physical editions. (Amazon pays authors 70%.)"

Comments

Re:IANAL, blah blah

[russotto]

This looks like a retarded money grab and nothing more. If the author's are so sure they retain "digital rights," why doesn't one of them post a book the publisher still has the rights to, in its entirety, on a website and see what happened.

Short answer: They've already done so, they got sued, and the publishers lost.

Random House's standard contract specified they had the exclusive right to sell the works in "book form". The authors asserted, and the courts agreed, that "book form" did not include electronic rights.