RH to Appeal Rosetta Ruling; Offers New E-books

Random House plans to appeal the recent court decision denying a preliminary injunction to block RosettaBooks from selling Random House backlist titles as e-books, and has announced it will release Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and nine Raymond Chandler titles as Random House e-books in the near future. RH said it will file the appeal this week.

The July 11 federal district court ruling denied RH's request for a preliminary injunction against RosettaBooks for selling Rosetta e-book editions of works by Kurt Vonnegut, William Styron and Robert Parker that are still in print on the RH backlist. The judge ruled that contracts for these authors did not automatically grant RH the right to publish the books in electronic form.

Despite the court's emphasis on the language of the contract, Harriette K. Dorsen, RH senior v-p and general counsel, said the appeal will focus on the court's views on new technological uses. "Random House believes that the district court misconstrued the prior cases dealing with 'new technological uses' by emphasizing the mode of delivery, as opposed to the content. The e-book contains the exact same text as the print book." In his ruling, Judge Sidney Stein drew several distinctions between this case and related cases in the broadcast medium, such as the fact that e-books are transmitted differently than print books. In the other cases, he wrote, the new technology "fell squarely within the same medium as the original grant."

Stuart Applebaum, spokesperson for RH, told PW that the court's ruling did not affect the release of the e-titles. "These were long in the pipeline, along with hundreds of other titles in various stages of being considered for our e-book program," said Applebaum, dismissing concerns that Random's e-book program was not moving ahead quickly enough. "We don't need to release all our titles at once, while the market is still in its incubation phase," he said. "We will continue to develop our classic backlist of e-books."

Applebaum also dismissed notions that the court's ruling may have undermined Random's legal claims on the titles in its series of classic e-book releases. "Our e-book program is done in cooperation with our authors and authors' estates. There's no change in our ambitions for our e-book program."

As for whether the specter of a court battle would discourage authors from signing with Rosetta and other new companies, Rosetta founder Arthur Klebanoff said authors would make decisions on the merits of particular contracts. "One of the first issues for authors is length of license," he said. "Unless the publisher is willing to grant a short license, our proposition [a seven-year license] is, by definition, more appealing."