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Stand-off over audiobook rights

30.10.07 Tom Tivnan

Publishers and agents clashed over audio rights at The Bookseller's second Audio Revolution seminar last week.

The seminar, attended by 120 publishers, retailers and audio specialists, saw Robert Lands, an intellectual property and media lawyer at Finers Stephens Innocent, suggest that in author contracts audio rights should be separate from book rights. "Why not put audiobooks in separate contracts and have a completely new model?" he asked. "Audiobooks in a way have far more in common with films than books in that there are actors, producers and a performance. There are a whole bundle of rights involved here that books just don't have."

Agent Simon Trewin agreed, saying he was keen to keep audio rights separate from book rights. "We are willing to give audio rights to the publisher who is keen to exploit them."

But Diane Spivey, rights and contract director at Little, Brown, had "the exact opposite opinion" to Trewin. "If we are the major investor in an author and an author's body of work, we want to be the owner of the entire author's work," she said

The panel agreed that audio departments, which used to be "the dusty back rooms" of publishing houses, are still struggling to embrace new technologies. Spivey said: "It's not an unwillingness to embrace the technologies, but often it's just not understanding the model."

Trewin apologised for his fellow agents, calling some of them "Luddites". He added: "The book industry is very insular and cliquey, and often we like to deal with people we know. [Audiobooks] people are coming in from outside with new ideas, and we are not sure how to react."

A full round-up of the seminar will be available online and in this week's Bookseller, out on 2nd November.

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By Nicholas Jones

Diane Spivey implied that book publishers producing audio was 'the traditional model'. But that's been true only for fifteen years or so. In the early 1990s, the likes of Penguin, HarperCollins and Hodder started audio lists, but before that the music industry (EMI Listen for Pleasure) and independents like Chivers (who reached only the library market) were the main producers - and audio rights were _not_ routinely included in book publishers' contracts. It was the book publishers getting involved which broke audio out of the perception that they were just 'books for the blind' and (gradually) made them appreciated as a mainstream entertainment in the High Street. If the agents retain audio rights, audio will not get the benefit of joint sales and marketing with the books, and may fall back into the 'dusty back rooms'. Of course the rights should be revertable if not used effectively, but where a book publisher has a professional and dedicated audio department (and that's most of the majors) it is in everyone's interest that the book and audio rights are bundled.

30 Oct 07 10:51

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