Part 1 of the study here.
Simon & Schuster has been raising more than a few eyebrows lately, but none of their moves have raised more than their recent change to their boilerplate author contract. News of this has been popping up for a little more than two weeks, but it's not exactly clear to me when S&S made the change--and the reason for that is because they didn't tell anybody. From what I've read, the change seems to have been noticed mainly by literary agents reviewing new contracts, who found that S&S was (at least at first) not keen on talking about or negotiating on it.
The change, to summarize, was a clause that granted S&S the right to continue publishing and selling any book they buy until its copyright runs out. Previously (and, for other publishers, currently) the policy was that rights reverted to the author when the book went out of print--"out of print" meaning it sells less than a certain number of copies per year, usually a few hundred.
If you want the full story, I suggest the Authors Guild news.
Naturally, the change has been viewed as "author unfriendly." The Authors Guild came out against it, as did several other organizations. S&S has backed up on itself since, announcing that the clause will be negotiable, though just how negotiable it will be is still murky, and it seems likely that authors who are not represented by literary agents will be left out in the cold.
Making Light spotlighted the most important part of this case when it was first developing:
S&S apparently decided to be the first bastard anyway. Notice the negative commentary. The second publisher to follow suit won't get anywhere near as bad a rap. By the time the third one flips, it'll be the standard practice.
So it's easy to see why authors' groups are so vehemently against the clause; if there's one thing they don't want, it's for another point against them--not being able to get rights to their books back from a publisher who isn't behind them--to become standard across the industry, and who can blame them?
What's not so easy to see is why S&S is doing this in the first place. If they wanted to piss off authors and their agents, then they've struck gold, but while their recent behavior has been odd, I'm not quite ready to chalk it up to supervillian-level evil.
One predominant theory is that it has something to do with electronic rights, i.e. eBooks, and the speculation that they may become valuable in the future, thus necessitating a hold on books' rights even after they are technically out of print. The wording of the clause certainly suggests it.
Another theory is that having life-of-copyright-length control over the books they publish will allow S&S to cut costs in areas like marketing and publicity. By keeping a bullpen of books never go out of print, they could keep selling every title they acquire for a hundred years without any of them needing to sell many copies.
Both theories have something to them, but after looking at the big picture for a while, I think there may be other forces at work. It seems to me like S&S is trying to change the way that the industry works, in a way that can't necessarily be gleaned from looking at any one angle on the issue. I'll save that for part 3.
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