HOW PUBLISHERS SEIZED THE DIGITAL HIGH GROUND (Excerpt from Digital Inc.)

If you’ve wondered why book publishers get 75% of e-book revenue, this excerpt from Digital Inc. will tell you.

As we entered the new century, the window of opportunity for authors and agents to recover rights to out of-print books started closing and would presently slam resoundingly shut as publishers awakened to the treasures inherent in their backlists. Reversion requests were ignored, protracted or refused altogether. My own efforts in that theatre of war degenerated into hand-to-hand combat. If some sort of organized resistance was not mounted soon, authors would soon find themselves at a permanent disadvantage.

But the agents were fatally dilatory about putting up concerted resistance. With no business model, no financial structure, no sales data and no performance projections, there was no way for them to put numbers into the blanks when bargaining for fair compensation. By the time the dust settled, publishers had seized the high ground, dealing themselves the lion’s share of e-book revenue.

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If you’ve enjoyed these excerpts, you’ll find many more surprising revelations in Digital Inc.: Inside the Transformation of the Book Industry from Print to E-Books. I wrote the book after I realized that so many people – writers, editors, and even readers – did not understand how radically the paradigm had shifted beneath their feet and before their very eyes. One day you were an analog person and the next you were digital. How did that happen? Digital Inc. will help you trace your steps.