News
Business author signs exclusive e-rights deal with Amazon
American business author Stephen R Covey has moved e-book rights to two of his bestselling books from his print publisher, Simon & Schuster Inc, to digital publisher RosettaBooks, which will sell the e-books via Amazon.com for one year.
According to the New York Times, this gives Amazon exclusive rights to sell electronic editions of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Principle-Centered Leadership. Covey is expected to gradually make other e-books available exclusively to Amazon, which will promote them on its web site.
The NYT said the move would "raise the already high anxiety level among publishers about the economics of digital publishing and could offer authors a way to earn more profits from their works than they do under the traditional system".
Arthur Klebanoff, chief executive of RosettaBooks, said Covey would receive more than half of the net proceeds from Amazon on all e-book sales, compared with a more standard 25%. "There are superstars, and superstars are entitled to more," Klebanoff was quoted as saying.
Adam Rothberg, a spokesman for Simon & Schuster, declined to comment directly on Covey’s decision, but told NYT: "Our position is that electronic editions of our backlist titles belong in the Simon & Schuster catalog, and we intend to protect our interests in those publications."
The news comes hot on the heels of reports that Random House US chief executive Markus Dohle had sent out letters to "dozens" of literary agents asserting the publisher's ownership of retrospective digital rights. The letter stated that the "vast majority of our backlist contracts grant us the exclusive right to publish books in electronic formats". Dohle added that many of the older agreements "often give the exclusive right to publish 'in book form' or 'in any and all editions.'"
The latest development oddly sees Random House and RosettaBooks at the centre of an e-book storm nine years after the two companies clashed publicly over the e-book rights of books by authors including William Styron, Kurt Vonnegut and Robert Parker.
Comments on this article
By Jason Dunne, London Smartphone
Disintermediation at work; the industry can expect more of it too. Just about every single author goes through a stage of being fed up with their publisher, even when the publisher has done a good job, at which point it gets tempting to cut the publisher out and go direct (or semi-direct in Covey's case). It will be fascinating to see how the industry responds - if it can, that is.15 Dec 09 11:12
By Marcus Stuart
All power to his elbow but surely the correct response for S&S would be to dump him as an author and let his books slowly die on the backlist? They were more than a little responsible for making the author successful, and now they find they are competing directly against him. No new publisher would touch any new books without digital rights being part of the deal. I don’t see any advantage to the author in flogging his ebooks this way.15 Dec 09 11:37
