Digital Publishing: A war is coming
27 July 2010
In any gold rush, there are always ones that knocked over or forgotten about in the rush. And in the race to monopolize the ebook sales channels it looks like traditional publishers will be pushed to the side. This was highlighted last week by the Wylie Agency’s announcement that they are to sell eBook editions of its modern classics exclusively through Amazons kindle store.
The Announcement (which was made at the launch of Odyssey , a new digital-only imprint set up to publish beautiful and digitally native eBook editions of some of the modern literary classics that TWA represent) has drawn severe criticism from their peers, no more so than Random House who also publish titles by the same authors. Upon hearing the news they forwarded a letter to the Amazon challenging their right to even sell the titles which are meant to be “subject to active Random House publishing agreements”.
Random House went further to state that it will not enter any other arrangements with the Wylie Agency on a worldwide basis until this situation is resolved. Their grievance is well founded and support by other publishing houses. They see this move to soley sell the digital editions through Amazon is a direct challenge to the revenue streams of the Authors.
“It is not a decision that Random House reached lightly, but one that is unanimously agreed by our senior publishing colleagues in the US, Canada and the UK,” said Random House Spokesman to the Guardian Newspaper.
The battle lines have truly been drawn. The problem is based around the ownership of digital rights of publications released before the arrival of the eBook format. Publishers argue that they do, while authors of course argue that the rights belong to them.
Web 2.0 and the applications it has generated, has really ignited the flame of content ownership. Over the last week there has been mayhem with the launch of social magazines or “SoZines” apps as they are more commonly known , which are magazines that are instantly created based on feeds, or followings through tweeter, facebook and RSS aggregators.
We have written several articles on the subject also. So the question arises? Doesn’t the author still retain ownership of the content, regardless of the medium on which it is delivered? When a reader purchases a digital edition of an authors book, they are not purchasing the software medium but the content that is keep inside it, the words of the author.
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