The Bookseller notes today that authors and their agents are struggling with publishers over just how broad a reach current contracts should have when it comes to ebook rights, particularly so-called “enhanced” ebooks that contain content that’s not available in print.

Some publishers–Hachette, for example–want everything; authors and their agents want to divide it up so that they can negotiate more precise, and potentially more profitable, royalties. Here’s how agent Jim Gill of United Artists puts it:

He said while some basic enhancements might be covered by an existing grant of ebook rights, “beyond that we’re talking about very sophisticated products which don’t resemble at all what we’d all understand to be ‘a book’ licensed under a volume-rights agreement”. Gill added United Agents would “no sooner naturally sell those rights to a book publisher than we’d sell them film rights.”

I’ve grown increasingly less convinced that existing publishing cabals are capable of being leaders in yet-to-be-developed digital publishing platforms or formats.

If the history of commerce on the Internet is at all predictive, then we probably have a good ten years before big publishers bring the right big guns to the fight and suck up the majority of the market. That leaves a lot of time for disruptive newcomers to transform the marketplace significantly enough that they emerge as permanent and powerful market leaders. See: Amazon this past decade.

Plenty of authors don’t want to worry about the business side of writing and publishing, which is why agents and publishers exist of course. But I’d caution any writer to hold as tightly to undefined rights as possible and to keep it out of a publisher’s hands–not so you can negotiate higher royalties down the line, but so you can experiment rapidly with new digital distribution methods without being hampered by slow-to-react corporations.

“Agents and publishers grapple over ‘enhanced’ e-book rights” [The Bookseller]

(Photo: einalem)