23/08/06

Agents on Google

Anecdotally, I spoke to a couple of UK literary agents last week, who were in Edinburgh for the book festival. One of the things we discussed was the approach of UK houses towards technology, digitisation, online marketing, websites and the like - in the light of presentations made by the big three (Penguin, Random House and HarperCollins) earlier in the year.

Previous reports from those presentations were mixed, but pretty much in line with what you’d expect - and this was confirmed with slightly more detail from the agents: some were doom-and-gloomy; others were excited and wide-eyed at the newfoundland of the web, and others still were (apparently) displaying controlled optimism for how they were going to exploit the technologies.

Another thing that came up was a recent presentation to one of the agents, by Google Book search. I was told that this presentation finally removed any doubt in the mind of the agent as to GBS being a very good thing. However - and apologies for this not being exactly news - what we agreed was the massive damage that had been done by Google on a public relations level, and the huge amount of ground they were going to need to reclaim to win the hearts and minds of publishers (who really, it seems, feel strongly enough about Google’s invasion to justify that kind of language). Admittedly it was late in the evening, but we agreed that surely, one very quick way to give some love back to the publishers would be for Google to hand back to the publishers the digitised files, in text (i.e. machine readable) as well as print/POD - ready PDF files, for the publishers to use in their own efforts? The cost of digitisation to the only publisher disclosing (HarperCollins, see previous post) is supposed to be in the seven figures each year - and that may just be for the USA.

Finally it was intriguing to see the relaxed (or at least open-minded and fair) attitudes of the agents to the digital rights question. For so many parties, the idea of renegotiating digital rights has become a mental block to the digital distribution question. For example, some reports suggest that agents view any rights not explicitly named in contracts (such as those which pre-date the notion of eBooks) as theirs and not the publishers; publishers take the opposite view. My brief overview of two highly thought of and powerful international agencies is that this is not the case: publishers have ‘verbatim’ rights (such as eBooks) but anything ‘enhanced’ needs to be renegotiated.

Clearly there is still the question of royalty splits and pricing, but this mus be otherwise encouraging.

Posted by Peter Collingridge in Future of the book, Google print, Publishing.