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Publishers will be obliged to raise digital royalty rates for authors, the chief executive of Pearson has said.
Speaking at a press conference covering Pearson's interim results, Marjorie Scardino said the industry was still in "the foothills" of the transition to digital books, but added "we will see a rise in royalty rates".
She said: "Publishing digitally is cheaper - but paper, printing, that is only 25% of the price [of a book], so even if we could do away with that totally, it's not going to make a huge difference. But it will make some difference, and then we'll have to make sure we do right by the author."
Digital royalty rates have been widely discussed, with agents and authors demanding higher rates, arguing that publishers are solely reaping the benefits of reduced costs, while publishers have countered that costs are much the same, and that e-books tend to eat into the sales of the physical product.
Scardino was responding to questions about the move by Andrew Wylie to launch a digital-only publishing house, selling e-books exclusively through Amazon. Wylie had previously complained that publishers were not offering acceptable royalties for e-books.
The Pearson chief executive, who was recently named 25th most important person in the media by MediaGuardian, echoed what Penguin chief executive John Makinson had said regarding the move by "I think it's slightly being taken out of proportion," she said, describing as "tiny" the number of backlist books for which Penguin had not obtained digital rights.
Makinson had earlier stressed that only one of the titles - Saul Bellow's novel The Adventures of Augie March - affected Penguin in the UK. The remaining Penguin titles, such as Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and Will S Burroughs' Junky, will not be sold by Odyssey in the UK.