On the very day that Bertelsmann announced its purchase of a share in barnesandnoble.com, a wide-ranging discussion of the likely impact of online bookselling on territorial rights took place on the eve of the Frankfurt Book Fair -- a discussion in which a senior publishing spokesman offered a strong defense of territorial rights, and an online bookseller suggested ways in which publishers could seek to protect them.
The occasion was the traditional Rights Directors Meeting held during setup for the fair, attended this year by an overflow crowd of nearly 250 people. They heard Ronnie Williams, who has been chief executive of Britain's Publishers Association for nearly a year, declare that "territorial rights encourage investment in the market infrastructure, but publishers are unlikely to sustain that investment if they become prey to 'free riders.' ...Rather than speculate on outcomes, the publishing industry should direct its energies toward building platforms -- of supply-chain improvement, contractual integrity, efficiency of publication -- as the bases for further progress."
The benefits to be derived from exclusive territorial rights, Williams said, include the encouragement of sustained investment in that national market by the licensed publishers. That would be threatened "if lack of exclusive rights, or the threat of their removal, makes them prey to the 'free rider' and remote 'jobber,' quick to profit from the publisher's marketing effort, but with no interest in the development of that market for the benefit of either the author or the consumer."
Williams noted that it was being argued that the global availability of books via the "cyberspace catalogue" and the inability to police sales via the Net make territorial rights effectively unenforceable. "That is a questionable argument on both moral and practical grounds," he declared, adding that the development of "broader and more sophisticated bibliographic databases giving complete and standardized rights information in respect of every book means that inadvertent infringement is no excuse." Markets, he said, "are social phenomena, and to thrive they need security, confidence, governance and the rule of law." Territorial rights, he stressed, are enforceable: "The answer to the machine lies in the machine."
In terms of online mail-ordering of books, he felt the advantage of the economy of scale enjoyed by U.S. editions would be offset by the shorter distance to market and increased efficiency in the supply of U.K. editions to U.K.-based customers; online booksellers, he said, "should be unwilling to prejudice local sources of supply for the sake of making a transient profit on a minority of infringing editions."
Dr. Simon Murdoch, who created Bookpages as an online bookseller in the U.K., sold it to Amazon.com, and now heads Amazon.co, the British outpost (there is also a German one), joked: "I come in peace." He added: "We want to uphold the law and do the right thing." The question, he said, was what is best for the customers, while recognizing that publishers are also customers. He said that Amazon d s not want to sell open-market titles in the U.K., which he described as "a shady practice," but he noted that there are still problems with contemporary rights arrangements. Many of the terms on which they were created were false, and did not take current technology into account; they are hard to track, and existing bibliographic records do not usually carry rights information. But his chief suggestions to avoid widespread purchases via the Internet of licensed titles were for publishers to try to ensure simultaneous publication on both sides of the Atlantic, and try to keep prices as similar as possible. He stressed that it is legal for individual purchasers to buy U.S. titles from Amazon.com even if their U.K. rights had been sold to an English publisher, but at present he is forbidden to sell U.S. titles.
Bantam Doubleday Dell's international director, Alun Davies, noted a recent case where Stephen King's new title, Bag of Bones, was published in the U.K. two weeks earlier than in the U.S., and many American collectors had snapped it up. "It is true that the old territorial rights system is dead or dying, but what is replacing it is not without merit," he said, pointing to Singapore's success as a declared open market in the past three years. Carole Blake of London's Blake Friedman literary agency said she did not believe territorial rights were yet obsolete, but "in the near future, single-language world rights deals will be inevitable," and she expects British authors to make such deals with British publishers, and Americans with U.S. publishers, and "publishers that are not able to publish worldwide will be in a difficult position."
