NEW YORK -- If Tom Petty was right, and "the waiting is the hardest part," the most difficult thing about buying books on the Net is about to go away. With the advent of mass-market electronic publishing and digital reading devices like the SoftBook and the Rocket eBook, one click in an online bookstore will bring you the text itself, with no wait for shipping.
Sounds great, right? Sure -- unless you're an author whose publisher bought the electronic rights to your book, in perpetuity, for a song.
Coming to market in time for the holiday rush, e-books are not only rewriting the rules of online book buying, they're threatening to undermine authors' hard-won rights to fair royalties and control of their own work. To tech-savvy literary agent Richard Curtis, that's a call to arms.
This week in New York, Curtis is announcing the launch of E-Rights, an agency devoted specifically to defending the rights of authors whose texts are ported into electronic form. Curtis will also negotiate deals with publishers for the electronic rights to print texts -- a market that is expected to grow swiftly as the early-adopters who shell out US$499 for a Rocket eBook seek to peruse more than the bundled-in Random House Dictionary with their new gadget.
"I'm warning authors that the grab is about to happen. Doomsday is here, baby. We must resist," Curtis says.
E-Rights will launch a Web site next week at www.e-rights.com (before launch, email can be sent to info@e-rights.com). Curtis is also mailing out a letter to all of his clients, warning them about the potential downsides for authors of technological advances like Lightning Print -- a service that prints single copies of books on demand -- and digital texts that never go out of print.
The letter reads, in part, "The good news for authors is that these developments will enable them to reach larger audiences for their work, and to earn more royalties. But the bad news more than outweighs the good.... When you or your agent negotiate your next book deal, you may be given a take-it-or-leave-it ultimatum by the publisher that it expects to acquire rights in perpetuity. You will have to decide whether you wish to accept those terms or risk that your book will go unsold.... Only the collective actions of a united author and agent community will overcome such pressure."
Curtis is no Luddite doomsayer. He predicted the invention of the electronic book at least 10 years ago, he says, and even confesses to making a quixotic attempt to develop a practical digital reading device in the early '90s. It didn't hurt Curtis' crystal-ball abilities that many of the authors he represents write science fiction -- writers like Harlan Ellison and Greg Bear.
He's looking forward to a revival of small-press publishing sparked by e-books, including a new wave of authors "who are being squeezed out by the progress towards homogeneity and the star system," encouraged by bestseller-oriented, quick-turnover chain bookstores.
But Curtis' concerns about authors' rights eroding in the digital age are not science fiction, says Phil Mattera, vice-president of the National Writers Union.
When publishers retain the rights of digital texts in perpetuity with only trivial disc-storage overhead, says Mattera, there's not as much incentive to aggressively promote them in the marketplace. When books on paper take up valuable inventory space, "there's an incentive to move those copies out of the warehouse and into the hands of readers."
The Writers Union has worked with authors whose books have been "published" online, only to find that their labor of love is a file languishing at an unvisited Web site, Mattera says.
"If it's just a matter of printing the book, you can go to a printer. The role of a publisher is to market and distribute the books. That's why they share the revenues."
Royalty percentages are also an issue in the digital age. Curtis thinks the standard 6 percent to 15 percent royalties for print are "way too low" for books sold as bits, when publishers and booksellers are spared the costs of printing, stocking, and schlepping them from warehouse to bookstore.
The problem is compounded when publishers claim that books in electronic form are sold at deeper discounts or bundled free with hardware, as CD-ROMS and software packages are.
"It's all so new," says Karen Boris, marketing director for HarperEdge Books. "Nobody knows if [ebooks] are going to make any money, nobody knows how this is going to work. Someone has to be willing to jump in and say, 'Let's test this.'"
It's just standard operating procedure for a publisher to "get as many rights as we can," she says -- and for agents to develop areas of individual expertise in negotiating for film rights, foreign rights, or multimedia rights.
To guarantee authors their due, Curtis suggests strategies like limiting a publisher's holding of rights to a certain number of years, fighting expanded definitions of "in print," and specifying minimum royalty payouts.
Even an agent who becomes an expert at defending his clients' electronic rights may find his position challenged as e-books encourage self-publishing and self-marketing, he reflects.
"A literary agent's role in this new age is going to be of questionable duration," Curtis says philosophically. "Agents are intermediaries in an age of disintermediation."
