The word is “Greed”, says author Tony Woodlief in the Wall Street Journal.
Is that the right word? We can agree on it as a working hypothesis, but in truth the issues are far too complicated for such oversimplification, and unfortunately they’re about to become even more complicated. Fiendishly, maybe even insolubly, complicated.
The High Cost of Permissions
In a cautionary anecdote Woodlief voices a complaint about the high cost of clearing permissions: “When I asked to use a single line by songwriter Joe Henry, for example, his record label’s parent company demanded $150 for every 7,500 copies of my book. Assuming I sell enough books to earn back my modest advance, this amounts to roughly 1.5% of my earnings, all for quoting eight words from one of Mr. Henry’s songs.” Woodlief spurned the record company’s price and elected instead to use a quote from a public domain source. In a masterfully understated phrase, he muses “it’s not clear that his interests —or theirs—are being served here.”
The debate over permissions has gone on for as long as copyright protection was established by statute, including the American Constitution, centuries ago. These laws attempt to navigate the tension – or perhaps conflict is a better word – between rewarding content creators for their works and satisfying the public’s need to benefit from those creations. Woodlief phrases it cogently: “While we want to give artists incentives, we don’t want the costs to be so high that art appreciation—a difficult cultural attribute to re-establish once it is lost —declines.”
Publishers and agents daily walk this tightrope, setting prices for licenses for properties under their control that recognize the licensor’s intentions and budget on the one hand and the value of the artist’s work on the other. To the seller the price may seem reasonable, to the buyer exorbitant. The battle is never-ending. Except that in the Digital Era the battle is intolerable and will simply have to stop.
Permissions clearance a disaster in the Digital Age
The reason it has to stop is the emerging species called Enhanced E-Books. Unlike simple print anthologies of an earlier, quainter century (the 20th), enhanced e-books draw on film, video, music, photographs, and other art forms. For which reason they are also known as “vooks” in contemporary parlance, a hybrid of “videos” and “books”. (See If They Asked Me I Could Write a…Vook?)
So? What’s the problem? For a recent webinar on the subject I stated it this way: “The challenge of clearing rights for enhanced e-books is so dauntingly complex that nothing less than an overhaul of the current antiquated system is necessary if enhanced e-books are not to die aborning.”
“Though an enhanced e-book would appear to be a digital product, in fact most of the processes necessary to produce it rely on the traditional and extremely tedious tasks of clearing rights and permissions, something publishers and agents have been doing for a century. For nothing more than a single image you will have to track down the credit line for the photographer or artist to give proper attribution; then you need to ascertain the source – where was it originally published? Then you must examine the contract to learn the terms by which the image was acquired. One time use only? Or did the purchaser buy rights in perpetuity? If the latter, you need to locate the purchaser to negotiate permission. If you’re using the image worldwide you need to clear permission with copyright owners in each territory (North American, UK, foreign language publishers, etc.
“And that’s for one image. If you use dozens, plus copyrighted texts, plus YouTube videos, plus movie clips, music and other protected works, the clearance process can be so daunting as to be not worth it.”
The solution? Become a Renaissance man
“There’s gotta be a better way,” I concluded.
Is there? Bartering isn’t practical, though Woodlief actually tried it. “Will you,” he asked some poet friends, “give me a poem in return for a book and dinner?” Some of them agreed, and their poems ended up in his book.
Marc Aronson took a stab at a more realistic approach in a recent NY Times op-ed. “For e-books, the new model would look something like this: Instead of paying permission fees upfront based on estimated print runs, book creators would pay based on a periodic accounting of downloads… If rights holders were compensated for actual downloads, there would be a perfect fit. The better a book did, the more the original rights holder would be paid.”
Unfortunately, Aronson doesn’t address how the book’s creator would divide payments among movie companies, music composers, photographers, videographers, and garden variety authors. Nor does he venture into the question of how to place comparative values on a one paragraph quote from an obscure journal versus a three minute clip from a blockbuster movie versus a top-of-the-charts hit song. Nor does he tell us how a humble little vookmaker will be able to afford the permissions cost of all that imported content when even a few minutes of music will bust his budget.
In all likelihood Aronson didn’t venture into this territory because it’s radioactive. It’s hard to imagine how we will come up with a solution in the foreseeable future, even though the success of this exciting new genre desperately depends on it. Unless…
Some years ago as the Digital Age dawned I wrote a piece called Author? What’s an Author? suggesting that the author of tomorrow would have to become more like the breed of filmmaker called “auteur” who writes, produces, directs, edits and scores his or her own movies.
“The day is coming—and much sooner than you may think—when authors will no longer be able to define themselves simply as creators of literary works,” I wrote. “As electronic technology hurtles too fast for even futurists to keep up with, a generation of readers is emerging that will not accept text unless it is interactively married to other media. The twenty-first century’s definition of ‘author’ will be as far from today’s definition as you are from the town scribe of yore.”
In short, if you possess the filmmaking gifts of a Hitchcock, the song-writing skills of Rogers and Hammerstein and the photographic genius of a Cartier-Bresson, and – oh yes – if you’re as good a writer as Tolstoy, you’ll be able to create your own enhanced e-books without laying out a dime for permissions. You’ll be nominated for a Vookie, which is undoubtedly what they will call the award given out to auteurs of vooks. Just make sure you have your speech ready if you win.
Richard Curtis
Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
Posted in Advice for Writers, All, Copyright and Piracy, E-book Applications, E-Book Reader Technology, E-books (business) | 4 Comment »
4 Comments - “One-Word Explanation of Why Enhanced E-Books Won’t Work”
-
Scott Nicholson
wrote on July 19, 2010 at 10:08 am
Absolutely agree–all the more reason for creators to hold onto their rights and build their own partnerships. Get two lawyers or two agents involved and everything gets a magnitude of order harder.
An author who isn’t finding video, audio, and programming partners (as well as translating partners) will find themselves as far behind as the modern publishing industry now is.
Scott Nicholson
www.hauntedcomputer.com
-
Jason Block
wrote on July 24, 2010 at 8:42 pm
Movies are efforts that involve multiple media and artists proficient in those media. The way the expense is handled is through the generous application of capital. If ‘enhanced ebooks’ become something consumers want (and that remains to be seen, they were never really interested in cd-roms) then studios (media companies) will create and market multimedia products called ‘books’. As you imply, it’s not so much a question of outsourcing, but of collaborative effort, with the author or editor acting as coordinator.
-
J. Fred MacDonald
wrote on July 29, 2010 at 11:56 am
Clearly, the publishing industry doesn’t know what the film-making industry well understands: licensing film footage is not impossible. If it were, we’d have no History Channel or Biography Channel, and Ken Burns would be in another line of work.
If you want to see what the enhance e-book future will look like, check out my website which has eight enhanced e-books plus other attractions: www.jfredmacdonald.com One difference, everything here is FREE OF CHANGE to read, view, and download.
-
Marva Aspenlieter
wrote on September 26, 2010 at 10:46 pm
I love the concept of enhanced audiobooks. I just bought an ipad and I went searching for a book to help me quit-smoking and also a book to help me not gain weight. I found this enhanced ebook, that had a hypnotic audio file for not gaining weight when quitting smoking and subliminal and hypnotic files for quitting smoking. I was able to get all my needs met in one book.. The Nic-The Habit Enhanced Version ebook.
itunes.apple.com/us/book/nic-habit-enhanced-version/id393046783?mt=11
- Advice for Writers
- Book Pricing & royalties
- Copyright and Piracy
- E-book Applications
- E-book Industry (news)
- E-Book Reader Technology
- E-books (business)
- Magazines and Newspapers
- Miscellaneous
- Publishing Contracts
- Publishing Industry
- 2012 (38)
- 2011 (436)