From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Sun May 19 2002 - 07:56:07 MDT
On Sun, May 19, 2002 at 04:05:28PM +1000, Damien Broderick wrote:
>
> I see that Fictionwise.com now sells TRANSCENSION, in a dinky downloadable
> version
>
> AVAILABLE ONLY IN SECURE
> MOBIPOCKET FORMAT ,
>
> listed on my page at
>
> http://www.fictionwise.com/eBooks/DamienBroderickeBooks.htm
>
> The price--$23.36--is nearly as great as the hardcover paper edition.
> Insane--when will publishers learn that e-readers aren't idiots? Especially
> ludicrous when THE DREAMING is there for $6.49...
I've spoken to the guys at Fictionwise myself (for obvious reasons). It
turns out that the price isn't set by Fictionwise but by whoever the rights
holder is. If the author holds the rights and is sane, the Fictionwise
price is sensible-ish and the e-books are published in open, unencrypted
formats. If the publisher holds the rights, they typically try to gouge
the public for the hardcover price and also demand draconian anti-copying
measures.
(Strong recommendation for Damien: talk to Fictionwise yourself, and
double- check who holds the e-book rights to your work. Unless you trust
the publisher to do the smart thing, you may be better off exercising
them yourself. Moreover, recent court cases in the US suggest that,
in the US at least, e-book rights are _not_ implicitly bundled with
paper edition rights, so you may be able to grab back control over the
e-book edition of Transcension if you think your publisher is being an
idiot. So far the only publisher I can think of who's approaching the
e-book market entirely sensibly is Baen Books, whose Webscription.net
site and free library are a model of how things ought to function.)
-- Charlie
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