Copyright, Ebooks and the Unpredictable Future

Insightful essay from Emily Williams in Digital Book World: "Ebook publishers have unsurprisingly been in the vanguard of offering new terms to authors, often as a way of competing against the big established print houses. RosettaBooks, under agent Arthur Klebanoff, and the new Diversion Books, established by agent Scott Waxman, both offer 3-5 year contracts based on the proven principle that the future is hard to predict and flexibility for authors is key. Richard Nash, the former publisher of print indie Soft Skull who is now setting up Cursor, a new publisher proposing an innovative crowd-sourced digital+print model, has been more vocal about overturning the copyright status quo. In a manifesto on his blog Nash laid out his own version of the change principle: 'The publishing industry is in a state of turmoil. New sales channels are arising, new formats, new terms of sale. Authors deserve the chance to renegotiate as the industry evolves.' Nash thus offers Cursor authors 3-year renewable contracts, in return for 'a fairly broad basket of rights in the license…in audio, in English-language outside the US, in magazine republication, in translation.'"