BEA Rountable: Google Book Settlement and Midsize Publishers
Sunday morning at BEA saw Brian O'Leary, David Marlin, and myself giving a roundtable sponsored by Metacomet on the impact of the Google Books project on midsized publishers. Brian's posted the slides here.
There were two sessions, which we ran in similar fashion. First Brian went over the Google Settlement and the Book Rights Registry. He outlined how the settlement will work - and the role of ad revenue in the agreement. He brought up the issue of POD - Google may decide to run a print on demand business for out-of-print titles. And he emphasized that mid-sized publishers will find their midlist titles potentially "squeezed" by additional sales from the long tail. As with any project where old content is coming back onto the market, there are loads of rights issues which are not easily resolved.
Many contracts were drawn up with absolutely no thought giving to digital content distribution - because it hadn't been invented yet. And many old contracts are stored in boxes in storage facilities offsite - not digitized, and not readily available. In many cases, the rights-holders have disappeared - are deceased, have moved and left no forwarding contact information, or are otherwise unavailable for negotiation. So publishers are faced with a monstrous rights rathole.
Both Brian and I emphasized that an agile content workflow would be able to help publishers grapple with a lot of these issues going forward. Bundling metadata with content means that rights information is always available. Chunking and tagging your content means you can determine downstream uses for it - such as licensing or creating new products - that Google will be able to help users discover and buy. And when you're negotiating your contracts, it's important to include language that covers you for these downstream uses - increasingly, you're not always going to know what those uses will be, but you want to be able to exploit them without having to go back to the agent or author every single time.
It was a great session, with a lot of back-and-forth. If you were there, please comment below on your impressions; if you were not there and you have questions that Brian's slides don't answer, leave your questions in the comments and we'll crowd-source the answers!
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