Blackboard’s Legal Moves Raise Fears

Thank you for a concise yet comprehensive discussion of the matter. It’s so refreshing to read a summary of the situation devoid of hype. After half a year devoted to getting much of our backlist and frontlist converted into the various ebook formats–which might be compared to simultaneous publication of a print book in the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic alphabets, although that would probably be easier–it’s heartening to see a piece on the subject that neither claims we’re all a decade behind the times because we’re concerned with niceties like legal rights and permissions nor implies that the process resembles falling off a log.

It’s a strange fact that many academic authors seem not to realize how !@#$%^&* complex their books are; one would think they’d have noticed. Oh, well. Thanks again.

Dottyeyes, scholarly publishing is not about textbooks. It’s mostly about research monographs by academic specialists that will be read by other researchers and advanced graduate students. Advances on royalties are rare, and print runs are modest. Most university presses are nonprofits that have to be subsidized by their host institutions. Textbook publishing is big business and another topic altogether. (And I don’t know the answer to your question!)

Actually, this piece does suggest the industry has its head up its ass about “legal rights and permissions.”

 I don’t see any such suggestion in the article.

You wouldn’t happen to be one of those eBook zealots, would you? If so, then you probably know that formatting even simple books for electronic publication is a tremendous amount of highly tedious work and that it’s all too tempting to settle for mediocre results.

And if publishers think that permission varies by format of reproduction it’s probably because that’s precisely how courts have often ruled.

As someone who has been publishing e-books since 2004, I agree with all of the above and then some!  We do straight text and often hire a contractor to format the longer e-books because getting a final product that is esthetically pleasing to the eye and, therefore, easy to read, is very difficult. Every device has its own quirks and text conversions have traps in the form of hidden codes that produce unintended artifacts that skew text all over the virtual page. It’s a mess.   The  economic appeal of e-books is that they are more ecologically responsible.  Traditional “best-seller” publishing prints thousands of books with the expectation that half of them will be returned to be destroyed or remaindered. This not only wastes the paper and labor needed to print and bind them, but the fuel to transport them. There is a print variant of the e-book called “print-on-demand” (POD) and this is the solution many small presses, academic or not, adopt.  Print copies are usually, even now, the only form accepted for review, so a small stock must be maintained for these and other complimentary copies. Not a perfect solution but a better one.  But the unit cost is higher and that drives the price per copy up because of the nature of the distribution system, which takes half, or more of the cover price. There is an expectation that e-books will be priced lower because no physical assets are consumed.  But you are not buying the physical asset, but the content within and the author(s) and the publisher still have to get paid somehow.  The inherent costs for editing and production are still there and formatting e-books properly is an added cost, even if you do it yourself.  Yes, e-books make is easier to publish.  The time-to-market is much quicker and the buy-in costs are less. but they are still there and actually making money given the number of people who expect to receive free or low-price books is harder than ever. The ten years you spent researching and writing the book is seldom acknowledged as something worthy of financial reward.

I suspect your issue is your HTML sucks, not that E-readers are highly variable in edge-case rendering.