From Yahoo! News:
The publishing world's worst nightmare seems to be coming true: One author has pulled the trigger and is now planning to bypass his publishing company and sending the e-book versions of some of his works directly to Amazon.com, eliminating what is increasingly becoming an old-guard middleman (and earning a much larger chunk of the pie for his trouble).
The author is Stephen R. Covey, the publisher is Simon & Schuster, and the books are The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Principle-Centered Leadership, perennial big sellers on the top business book sales list.
Covey seems to be viewing this as an experiment, giving Amazon rights to the e-books for just a one-year period. I can't imagine he'll come away from the experiment unsatisfied: The royalty he earns on each sale of one of his e-books will earn at least twice the royalty he gets from Simon & Schuster, and possibly much more. His e-book technology provider, RosettaBooks, puts it pretty bluntly: "There are superstars, and superstars are entitled to more."
Amazon says it will heavily promote the e-books of the works in question -- Habits sells more than 100,000 paperbacks a year alone, making that one title a million-dollar book year in and year out.
S&S isn't taking this lying down. The company claims that it owns the exclusive electronic rights to all of its works (Habits was obviously published before e-books came into being, so who owns the rights to publish books in this format are naturally in question -- the exact same thing happened when magazines and newspapers started putting old stories on the web), and the publisher says it plans to protect its interests. How it shakes out from here is anyone's guess, but my hunch is that lawyers will be involved, heavily.
No comments:
Post a Comment